(urth) 5HC : Skinner, Turing (fwd)

[Dan'l Danehy-Oakes]

> >>(Ex: Three people are locked in a room. One is stabbed
> >>to death - several wounds. There are only seven possible
> >>answers to the question "whodunit?")
> >>
> >>
> Well, that's assuming quite a number of givens or axioms e g. ' no one else
> coulda got in' 'people cannot commit suicide or help each other murder a
> person' 'stab wounds cannot magically or spontaneously appear- all stab 
> wounds correspond with a stab and vice versa' etc.

I did include suicide as one of my seven options, as well as 
suicide assisted by one or both of the other two. To be precise,
my seven possible answers to "whodunit" were:

1. Suicide by V
2. Murder by A
3. Murder by B
4. A+V
5. A+B
6. B+V
7. A+B+V

I admit that I am taking as axiomatic that being "stabbed to death"
(the given condition was that V was in fact stabbed to death, not just
that V is dead and there are stab wounds on the body) implies that 
someone did the stabbing, By "locked in a room" I intended (by the 
conventions of the locked room mystery) to make it axiomatic that
nobody could get in or out during the period in which the stabbing
took place.

> >I suspect that this is true only of situations where you are faced
> >with countably finite numbers of possible choices...

> Sounds to me like someone has thought up a situations
> in which one is faced with transfinite choices
> Wait, does that even make sense in our universe? 

H'mmm. Good question; assume that time and space are
quantized and there's no situation I can think of in which 
we might have a _genuinely_ transfinite number of 
choices. However, we can have situations which are for
all purposes nonfinite - like the "infinitely variable" speed
control on a power drill, or the analog volume control on a
tube-driven stereo receiver: it must have some quantized
number of states, but those states are closer together than
the limit of our ability to distinguish them, so they are 
indistinguishable from an uncountably infinite set to the
limits of our perceptions.

> One more thing!
> I was reading in my Star Wars collection t'other day, when, en route
> to Boba Fett's story in Tales from Jabba's Palace, to see whether I
> could place anymore of the anecdotes, an excruciating name caught
> my eye. It was remarkably similar to yours.  A relation?

The closest possible relation, me. What are you doing reading 
such trash?

--Dan'l

-- 
"We're going to sit on Scorsese's head"
     -- The Goodfeathers