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As an example to illustrate how this initially-simple-looking project spans the whole range of all possible difficulty levels: suppose you had a source-code for a superhuman flawless obedient honest AGI, call it HAL. From that source-code, you could derive a source code X for: "Print all the computer programs which HAL would list if HAL were commanded: 'Enumerate every computer program which you know to be an intuitive ordinal notation'". Since we're assuming HAL is obedient and honest, all of X's outputs will be intuitive ordinal notations, so X itself is an intuitive ordinal notation: you could say it notates "the ordinal of HAL". So this innocent-looking exercise in fact touches the most ambitious possible projects, even "Design a perfect superhuman AGI" :-)



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