- From: Elliotte Harold <elharo@metalab.unc.edu>
- Date: Sat, 22 Sep 2007 06:56:56 -0400
- To: wangxiao@musc.edu
- CC: Rhys Lewis <rhys@volantis.com>, 'Alan Ruttenberg' <alanruttenberg@gmail.com>, 'www-tag' <www-tag@w3.org>, 'Jonathan Rees' <jar@creativecommons.org>
Xiaoshu Wang wrote: > I think Alan has mixed the machine consistency to reality. A machine > can only assert the consistency among statements, it cannot verify if a > statement is valid in reality. The latter is done by a social process. Perhaps it depends on what you mean by "machine". A Turing machine cannot, but a generic machine most certainly can. For example, a machine could well verify that the temperature at a certain location is between 20C and 23C at the current time. Given sufficient sensors and technology, there are many factual statements which are fully machine verifiable. -- Elliotte Rusty Harold elharo@metalab.unc.edu Java I/O 2nd Edition Just Published! http://www.cafeaulait.org/books/javaio2/ http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ISBN=0596527500/ref=nosim/cafeaulaitA/
Received on Saturday, 22 September 2007 10:57:12 UTC