Strange

Well obviously not, as I commented on a later part of your screed. You can say it as many times as you like but that doesn't make it true. Nope. You can't shift the burden of proof. You are the one making unsubstantiated claims (I am just pointing out the logical errors in your argument). So it is up to you to provide evidence to support your claims. Clearly you didn't read what I said: Yes, our minds can create neutral images that provoke no emotional response. But our minds can also create thoughts and images that create a powerful emotional response, either positive or negative (or both). This means that the conclusions you draw are not necessarily correct. You argument is equivalent to: "We see black dogs, therefore all dogs are black". (I'm sure there is a fancy Latin name for this fallacy, but I can't be bothered to look it up.) So, because this is your opinion, it must be true?

How do you know they are lying? This is the fallacy of begging the question: pain feels bad; people who say pain feels good are therefore lying; therefore pain feels bad. After such a blatantly false claim, is there any point reading more? Well, lets see... This is a flawed argument. Yes, our minds can create neutral images that provoke no emotional response. But our minds can also create thoughts and images that create a powerful emotional response, either positive or negative (or both). Therefore your conclusion that all meaning we create is neutral is false. It is also false because not everything we experience is created by our own minds; it may be the result of external stimuli which may be positive or negative. I gave up reading at that point as there is no point wading through 1,000s of words of nonsense based on multiple logical fallacies.

Fun? Fun?? Bah. Humbug!

It is not (just) in the logic. IT IS A STATE MACHINE. Therefore, it is conditional. That is what "state machine" means. Sheesh.

If there were no choices being made, then the game would continue in exactly the same way independently of the user's input (which wouldn't be much fun). You have created an FSM with the next state determined by user input: That input then changes the state (i.e. what is stored in your frame-buffer) which determines how the FSM will respond to the next set of inputs. You may have eliminated "if" statements (because you have hardwired it) but you have not eliminated conditional behaviour. The state transitions are, by definition conditional (except for the trivial case where there is only one exit from a state). This is a standard way of translating software (or a specification) to a hardware implementation - either manually or using automated tools. An FSM is not quite equivalent to a Turing machine, but this is because it doesn't have working memory not because it doesn't have conditional execution. Therefore, not all programs can be turned in state machines, which means that your solution does not always apply.

So you are just going to ignore all the comments on your previous posts and post another essay. In which case: tl;dr. Get a blog.

I didn't say "all". No you didn't. The "next state" decision (based on user input) is a conditional decision. The main thing you are getting rid of in your approach is loops.

Indeed. You are basically storing every possible game. But there are couple of problems with this (with respect to the original question). Firstly, you can't just play back a particular game; you need to respond to input. This means that the system is a giant finite state machine (FSM) where the frame buffer is used to store the current state; the next state is determined by user input. This is implicit conditional execution. But, apart from that, how do you know what to put in the ROM? The only way of working out the ROM content is to write a program and play (or simulate) every possible game! This comes back to the example I was going to use before you went totally bonkers: generating digits of pi. You could, of course, have a big ROM and a bit of logic to output the first N digits if you knew what they were. But to calculate the digits, you need a general purpose computer.

No. More here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Measurements_of_neutrino_speed It looks like the speed of neutrinos is, so far, indistinguishable from the speed of light.

It depends how much energy it has. But because of their low mass, most neutrinos move at pretty close to the speed of light.

That may be one way to implement the operation but says nothing about whether it is required or not.

You mean the math/Latex stuff? There is a guide here: http://www.scienceforums.net/topic/3751-quick-latex-tutorial/ And an interactive editor here: http://www.codecogs.com/latex/eqneditor.php

You can, of course, contrive any number of examples where conditional code is not needed (although, I am not convinced that is possible in this case because of the non-deterministic [from the point of view of the program] user input). However, the original question was about the general principle; in which case, a general purpose computing device (or language - just to annoy winger) must include conditional execution in some form.

Shouldn't that be [math]\displaystyle {v = \frac{2 \pi r}{T}}[/math]?

No. But I wouldn't know how to go about proving it.

I could not begin to say what class of algorithms require conditional statements (of some form). As I say, I never studied computer science, what little I know comes from learning to program in functional languages, some general reading and talking to people doing research in formal methods. However, something like determining if a missile hits a target or not is essentially conditional. However, if you are asking specifically about "conditional branching" as implemented in hardware, then that is a more difficult question. There are ways of implementing a general purpose (Turing equivalent) machine without conditional branching.

It is an illusion: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Motion_aftereffect

Novelty is relatively easy to determine objectively: they couldn't find any previous description of a similar system. The trickier element is inventiveness; this is partly subjective decision - is it sufficiently different from what came before and also not an obvious (to one skilled in the art) improvement.

The fact that a photon is destroyed if it is detected meant that this stayed as a thought experiment for a long time. Eventually someone worked out that you could use entangled photons to detect which slit the photon went through. In other words, you generate a pair of entangled photons (so there is a known relation between their polarization). By putting a different polarizing filter on each slit and measuring the polarization of the other entangled photon (the one that doesn't go through the slit) you can determine which slit the photon went through. This destroys the interference pattern. But then, if you erase the "which slit" information by putting a diagonal polariser in the path of the detector photon (i.e. the one that doesn't go through the slits) then you cannot determine which slit the other photon went through and the pattern re-appears. Even more surprisingly, you can erase the information after the photon has hit the screen and it still allows the pattern to appear. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quantum_eraser_experiment http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Delayed_choice_quantum_eraser The same thing works with electrons (using the spin of the electron).

Although there have been threads disputing the basics of arithmetic (either claiming it is wrong or that is just an arbitrary assumption). Or people are unwilling to accept the clarity offered. (Horse, water, etc.)

Yes. There are an unlimited number of possible outcomes. As far as I know a theoretical "perfect player" could keep the game going for ever. (Although that may be impossible to prove, per the 'halting problem'.)

Not where I come from. Although the foreign form has pretty much taken over now, so I am a little surprised to see I wrote that. It is an abstraction. The question is about what features are required to compute a general function. This can be considered from the point of view of a programming language (as the original question asked) or from the point of view of the hardware required (as someone else brought up). These are equivalent: a "thing" which implements either a Turing machine or lambda calculus can compute any [computable] function. And I think it can also be shown that there is no extra functionality which would make the compute able to solve problems that the Turing-equivalent machine could not solve. (Apart from magic: knowing what the answer is. Such a machine is known as an oracle.) But thanks for your useful contribution to the discussion. Incidentally, for those without a degree in computer science (which didn't even exist as a subject when I went to university) one of the best non-technical explanations of the theory of computability is in Gödel, Escher and Bach by Douglas Hofstadter.

There is a tiny subset of programmes which can be represented like that. They consist purely of combinatorial logic based on their inputs, have no loops and no stored state. There are few real-world programmes in this class apart from a few teaching examples like "get input from the user, convert it from miles to kilometers and display the result". A general purpose computer (or language) must have stored state, the ability to jump to a destination address, and conditional operations (which does not necessarily mean "if" constructs). Or, more generally, it must be equivalent to a Turing machine or the lambda calculus.

Thanks for letting us know where you are from.

That doesn't sound like a testable prediction. A testable prediction needs to be quantitative in some way, and will discriminate between your hypothesis and the alternatives. For example, "if my hypothesis is correct then when we perform <details of experiment> we will see <details of result> but if I am wrong we will see <alternative result>" Where the results can be objectively measured to determine which is correct. So far all you have is some vague waffle about complexity and randomness and "point of view" (which doesn't exist in chemistry). It isn't clear what your "theory" is, or how it is different from the standard view of biochemistry. Making a quantitative, testable prediction would help to clarify that.