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Article 3805 of comp.ai.philosophy:
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>From: markrose@spss.com (Mark Rosenfelder)
Newsgroups: comp.ai.philosophy
Subject: Re: Look-up tables
Message-ID: <1992Feb17.175002.38249@spss.com>
Date: 17 Feb 92 17:50:02 GMT
References: <299C3CC6.15601@orion.oac.uci.edu>
Organization: SPSS Inc.
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In article <299C3CC6.15601@orion.oac.uci.edu> schoi@teri.bio.uci.edu (Sam "Lord Byron" Choi) writes:
>Although it is true that the totality of any human being's conversations
>throughout a lifetime is necessarily finite in retrospect, this says nothing
>about the possible avenues of conversation at any particular point in
>an ongoing conversation.
>
>For instance:  Looking back at past conversation, I might have asked at one 
>point the question, "Is four evenly divisible by two?"  After I have asked this
>question, it only goes down as one of the many questions I have asked in
>my lifetime.  At the instant before I asked the question though, any number
>of variations could have been possible.  (e.g. "is five evenlydivisible by
>two," "is six evenly divisible by two,""is seven evenly divisible by two" etc).

No, "any number" of variations is _not_ possible.  It's true that you have an
infinite sequence of possible sentences here; but as the numbers get longer
they take longer to say, too, and eventually you'll reach numbers which cannot
be named in a human lifetime; so the number of sentences of this form which
the table lookup has to worry about is finite.

Suppose there's n words in the language and you can say m words in a lifetime.
Then the total number of possible conversations is n^^m-- a finite number. 
Very, very big, but finite.


