[Turing machines] don't figure out what they'd do and then do the opposite, unless you just invert the programming.

Again, there is nothing that the Turing machine would ever need to figure out... it simply needs to just blindly do the opposite of whatever some black box says is supposed to happen... there is no "intelligence" behind this decision, it is simply flawlessly executing the instructions that would have been programmed into it, and the only way the box could ever be correct is if the machine were malfunctioning... a malfunction is not outside of the realm of possibility, but a malfunction is also generally outside of the scope of any thought experiment that involves a Turing machine in the first place. The only "thinking" that might arguably be involved is inside of the black box, which reports whatever it is that is about to happen.. But the only thing the Turing machine does is take the information the bllack box provides as its input and outputs the inverse. So in theory, the Turing machine would simply always do the opposite of whatever the black box said is going to happen happen, and in theory, the black box will always say what is about to happen.

Except of course... the black box *CAN'T* always say what is going to happen... as the thought experiment illustrates. The fact that no such black box could ever be constructed does not change the fact that no possible quantity of information would ever be sufficient to predict a future where information about the future would ever be used to produce its opposite. The universe's current state is insufficient to predict the future and simply cannot be entirely deterministic.

It just means that you can't write down the state of the entire universe using only the matter present inside of it.

Except that's generally understood to be what materialistic determinism *IS*... so I'm not sure if you meant to or not, but you've really just sort of agreed with me there.

But of course...

I have no idea whether the universe is deterministic.

For someone who is professing to have no idea, you seem to be abnormally determined to convince me that my conclusions are invalid... perhaps you should try to figure out why you believe what you do.... or if you don't know what you believe, I might suggest you should stop trying to point out what you think may be wrong with another person's ideas just because you don't happen to agree with their conclusions, because otherwise you just come across as somebody who wants to disagree for the sake of being disagreeable, and not somebody who has actually made any real attempt to rationally think through their beliefs.

And lowering yourself to her level by namecalling accomplishes what, exactly?

Again, it's not being suggested that walking is necessarily the overall most efficient means of unpowered transport, or necessarily anywhere even close... rather, it is being suggested that the way humans do it is about efficient in energy usage as you can physically get and still be able to actually still *call* it walking, and not just simply generalize it as "unpowered locomotion".

Cycling may use the same muscles as what walking does, but cycling isn't walking. You use the same muscles as walking while roller blading, arguably even more similarly to walking than cycling is, but that's not considered walking either.

The question at hand, however, is can *WALKING* be made much more efficient than the way humans do it naturally? This exoskeleton only improved efficiency very nominally... And the fact that there can exist no shortage of ways to get from point A to point B using the exact same muscles as walking far more efficiently than walking, but without walking in the first place, is entirely irrelevant.

Of course there is. If it's less efficient than cycling, then energy is lost somewhere in the system

Its less efficient than cycling, as was pointed out above, but again.... cycling isn't walking. I'm not arguing that there are much more energy efficient means of unpowered locomotion, the article merely suggests that the way that humans have evolved to walk may very well be nearly as efficient as *walking* can physically get.

The fact that there provably exists far more efficient modes of externally unpowered movement that no longer qualify as walking in the first place is entirely beside the point.

Suggesting that walking could be made more efficient simply because cycling happens to more efficient than walking is a complete non-sequitur, at best. It's like suggesting that you should be able to get just as much energy out of a coal furnace as a nuclear one of the same size. You have to completely change the way you are using the energy in the first place to get that much more efficient energy utilization, and after you've done that, you will end up with something that is no longer in the same category of system where you started (coal furnace vs nuclear furnace). Using this exoskeleton to move around is marginally more efficient than walking without it, but I'd suggest that using it still at least qualifies as walking. If you are going to argue that it doesn't, then that's a different matter... but it doesn't defeat the point being made about the way humans walk being very efficient

One might conclude that the only way to make unpowered locomotion much more efficient than how humans walk is to resort to mechanisms that no longer qualify as walking... cycling being just one obvious example.

You're not missing anything... Carly is just utilizing an ad-hominem to stir up people's emotions on the matter, and thereby incite a passionate response... some of that passion will fall in her favor, while most of the passion that happens to fall the other way will tend to get diffused by the people who might have already been opposed to her viewpoints, but already have a mindset that this is yet another example of Carly Fiorina just being her whiny and immature self (which is good... an equally passionate rebuttal would probably end badly for everyone... not just Ms Fiorina). It's nothing more or less than her being a manipulative little bitch. Of course, that's nothing new for Carly anyways.

Of course there are more efficient systems for getting around.... but is there much room for improvement for the practice of walking itself?

Walking may admittedly be overall quite inefficient as a means of motion when you compare it to something like cycling, but how humans walk still might be as about efficient as the practice of walking itself can still physically get.

It doesn't have to "figure out" anything... if the sufficient state to predict the future exists, then you could at least theoretically use some alleged "magical" black box to say whatever a future state is going to be based on the universe's current state, and just have the deterministic turing machine query that. My point is that when the turing machine is programmed to do the opposite of whatever the black box says is going to happen, absolutely no amount of information, even an infinite amount, will actually ever be sufficient for such a black box to actually correctly predict the future. If insufficient information to predict the future exists at the present time, then the universe cannot be deterministic.

In fact, the *only* real reasons that I know of to rigidly hold onto the notion that the universe is deterministic are either out of a subjective sense of aesthetic appeal (but bear in mind that while a deterministic universe cannot contain any non-deterministic components, even a universe with non-deterministic components can still have deterministic components inside of it as well, so the aesthetic appeal of determinism for many practical purposes is not actually lost in a non-deterministic universe), or out of a sense of a no less subjective religious (or anti-religious) world-view that is actually simply founded on the principles of materialistic determinism, and is being adhered to out of a sense of blind-faith dogma.

Depends on how strict the coding standards at the company are... comments left in the software that do not describe what the code does may be considered a violation of such standards, and I've worked at game studios where doing such things was technically a fireable offense, but would definitely at least earn a stern warning to not ever do it again.

... for putting in any unauthorized code, this tends to dissuade the programmers from independently putting any such code into the product.

But if the instruction table says to move left when an alleged so-called analysis of the future says it will move right, or vice versa, assuming that analysis of the future were a magical black box, it will still do one or the other, quite predictably, as a deterministic system should, but it will still always produce a result inconsistent with that prediction, which shows that the future cannot be predicted with 100% certainty from a given state... where determinism suggests that everything about the future *CAN* be determined from its current state. Whether such information were even knowable in the first place is irrelevant, no quantity of information (even an infinite amount) can ever be sufficient to accurately predict the result, which means that the universe cannot be wholly deterministic, and thus contains at least some non-deterministic components.

Cycling isn't walking. It might be unpowered (save for human muscles), but its definitely not walking... if you are going to argue that moving around in this unpowered exoskeleton isn't really walking either, then you might have a point.

You seem to be lumping together the information necessary to make a prediction and the results of that prediction. Just because you have the inputs, and could make a prediction, doesn't mean you have the results of the predictions instantly, with no cost of resources.

I'm suggesting that with such an experiment, it wouldn't matter how much resources it required... even if the amount of resources were infinite, the results of the prediction would *always* be wrong, because the experiment is explicitly designed to contradict whatever is to be expected for its output. This thought experiment shows that it can be possible for there to exist insufficient information to predict the future, and so it follows that the universe cannot be wholly deterministic.

And there is, in fact, no compelling reason beyond so-called aesthetic appeal *why* the universe needs to have deterministic behavior anyways.... further, the fact that it might not be entirely predictable does not mean that deterministic systems cannot exist at all, so we don't need to lose our precious determinism entirely even if we accept that the universe is, at its core, inherently unpredictable.

The behavior of a halting machine is completely deterministic

Really? What happens if you ask it to tell you if a function will terminate when the function does the opposite of whatever the halting machine says the function will do?

Still think it's deterministic?

The behavior of a halting machine can only be deterministic for certain types of functions.

I equate deterministic with predictable... that's all.... It seems reasonable to me to conclude that if one has information at hand, this information can be utilized to take a course of action. I suggest implementing this process within a deterministic system such as a theoretical computing machine to illustrate that there is no possible way for the system to fail to perform its function However, since there can never exist enough information about the future at the time that such information is being analyzed to exclude that possibility from occurring, the universe cannot be entirely deterministic, and there is no possible way for it to be... just as certainly as if a black-box halting problem solver would be a non-deterministic system as well.

The halting problem requires a deterministic system, it does not require that the universe itself to be deterministic. The universe encompasses everything that ever was, is, or will be... including all deterministic systems. My main point is that in a deterministic universe you should be able to contrive a deterministic thought experiment which will always be able to correctly predict the outcome of the experiment, but if you design the experiment so that its output is always the opposite of whatever was predicted, then it becomes evident that there can never be sufficient information at the beginning of the experiment to predict its conclusion, and if the current state of the universe is not sufficient to predict a future state, then the universe is not deterministic.