From mboxrd@z Thu Jan  1 00:00:00 1970
Message-ID: <b18ed236c4cf6d2751dfdf32fb3c8de3@quanstro.net>
From: erik quanstrom <quanstro@quanstro.net>
Date: Sat,  5 Sep 2009 20:56:13 -0400
To: 9fans@9fans.net
In-Reply-To: <E39B230CA56D0C737DD30CF6@[192.168.1.2]>
MIME-Version: 1.0
Content-Type: text/plain; charset="US-ASCII"
Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit
Subject: Re: [9fans] nice quote
Topicbox-Message-UUID: 65d488d2-ead5-11e9-9d60-3106f5b1d025

> > The instruction most conspicuously absent from the instruction set of the
> > Z3 is conditional branching. [...] but there is no straightforward way to
> > implement conditional sequences of instructions. However, we will show
> > later than conditional branching can be simulated on this machine.

i think your reasoning is going backwards in time.  the fact that
a historian later can note that they *could* have had conditional
branching, if they'd thought of it further bolsters my position
that it is not immediately obvious that conditional branching
is what you want.

in fact, none of the things we take for granted --- e.g., binary,
digital, stack-based, etc. --- were immediately obvious.  and it
might be that we've got these thing that we "know" wrong yet.

i would imagine that in 30 years there will be several "obvious"
things about quatum computers that nobody's thought of
yet.

- erik