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Comment by maest | Hacker News Reader

To be fair, no computer is an actual TM since memory is finite.

It can pause and ask you to temporarily attach another hard disk. Could be infinite as long as one can afford buying disks.

But the amount of raw material on the planet needed for manufacturing more disks is finite.

The amount of raw material in the universe is finite at a given point in time (it could be infinite over time, we don't know if time is infinite either).

I think we've already established (especially over the past year) that fiat money is infinite.

The Turing machine is a mathematical model. Infinity only exists in the world of mathematics. The physical world is by definition finite.

A paper clip machine scenario but instead it wants to turn all atoms into hard drives so it can keep running itself. A machine who's purpose is itself. A stupid orobus that will kill us all.

> The physical world is by definition finite

This isn't obvious to me, would you elaborate?

Is the universe finite?

https://answers.yahoo.com/question/index?qid=20200123104919A...

Sadly that thread will soon be gone due to the approaching Yahoo Answers apocalypse. Hopefully Internet Archive will save it!

Take everything in the world. Every physical piece. Break it into the smallest slice you care to: (atoms, quarks, whatever). The count of those things is bounded. It's a huge number, but it's finite. Infinity is not a real concept, it's imaging that there is no number that can be bounded.

This demonstrate countability, not finiteness. If by "world" you mean universe, there's no guarantee that you can "take everything in it", because it might be infinite.

Maybe, there are hypothesis’ that the Universe is infinite. The observable Universe is finite.

If the universe is infinite, Then the observable universe is only as finite as the length of your life and capability to traverse through space.

Not necessarily. The observable Universe could also be reducing over time. Distant galaxies are accelerating in their travel away from our observation position because space itself is expanding. This means that over long periods of time, objects at the periphery of the observable Universe will red shift out of view.

Classic HN: from article on new Microsoft Excel feature to semantic debate on the definition of the universe in record time.

Right, all computers have a bounded amount of state, so they can only parse regular languages.

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