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Article 4682 of comp.ai.philosophy:
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>From: jeff@aiai.ed.ac.uk (Jeff Dalton)
Newsgroups: comp.ai.philosophy,sci.philosophy.tech
Subject: Re: A rock implements every FSA
Message-ID: <6477@skye.ed.ac.uk>
Date: 23 Mar 92 18:52:43 GMT
References: <1992Mar17.231452.9979@husc3.harvard.edu> <1992Mar18.045939.3084@bronze.ucs.indiana.edu> <1992Mar18.095140.9984@husc3.harvard.edu>
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In article <1992Mar18.095140.9984@husc3.harvard.edu> zeleny@zariski.harvard.edu (Mikhail Zeleny) writes:
>In article <1992Mar18.045939.3084@bronze.ucs.indiana.edu>
>chalmers@bronze.ucs.indiana.edu (David Chalmers) writes: 

>>Therefore the claim that the system in question implements the FSA is
>>groundless.  At best, it implements a "trace" of a particular run
>>of the FSA, as Joseph O'Rourke nicely put it.
>
>This is easy: first, you interpret the states of Putnam's automaton as
>ordered pairs <state, input> of a FSA (cf. the relevant comments on p.124);
>follow this by running through enough input/state combinations to exhaust
>the finite combinatorial possibilities afforded by the machine's table.
>Finally, you do the mapping.  In this way, there will be no counterfactual
>possibilities left unaccounted for.

This seems reasonable to me, and I think it answers Chalmer's
objection.


