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gngeal | 12 years ago

an EE can't simply change the brightness of the sun to meet a requirement. We can.

Wow, you can change the brightness of the sun to meet a requirement?

BTW, there are quite a few limitations placed on you by nature: uncomputable numbers, NP-completness, ...

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Guvante|12 years ago

> BTW, there are quite a few limitations placed on you by nature: uncomputable numbers, NP-completness, ...

Not really, NP-completness is only important if you want perfect solutions, which aren't necessary. Uncomputable numbers have no usage in real world scenarios.

Finally it is important to note that while a physical turing machine cannot exist due to lack of infinite tape, real machines are also more powerful than turing machines, for instance by having a real time clock and communication abilities.

For these reasons saying what we can and cannot do is quite complicated. For almost every situation possible, the only answer that is negative about capabilities is "it will take a while".

ericHosick|12 years ago

> Wow, you can change the brightness of the sun to meet a requirement?

Sure, why not? sun.brightness = sun.brightness * 2.0f;

In fact, a lot of games play with physics to get cool behavior. I can adjust the "constant" G in my game to be something other than 9.8 m/s to make it interesting.

One moment the G vector may be down and then suddenly it flips up. Why not?