Wikipedia:Articles for deletion/Super-recursive algorithm


 * The following discussion is an archived debate of the proposed deletion of the article below. Please do not modify it. Subsequent comments should be made on the appropriate discussion page (such as the article's talk page or in a deletion review).  No further edits should be made to this page.

The result was no consensus to delete, default to keep.  "Merge" is a variant of "keep" for AfD purposes, but a merger should be discussed on the article talk page.  Sandstein  19:32, 30 May 2008 (UTC)

Super-recursive algorithm

 * ( [ delete] ) – (View AfD) (View log)

See below for reasons, I am just trying to correct the form of this nomination Hans Adler (talk) 17:15, 25 May 2008 (UTC)

I don't believe this article clears the bar for notability.

Here is where I have looked for the obvious evidence:

(1) Google book search: Super-recursive algorithms are very briefly mentioned in a few books that (so far, in my searches) show little evidence of actually exploring the topic under that name. These mentions seem to be confined to the kind of kitchen-sink listing of vaguely related work that a serious author might only bother with up-front in order to preempt being bombarded much later by people asking why their work wasn't mentioned.

(2) Peer reviewed literature: Super-recursive algorithms are discussed at length in papers written by Mark Burgin, who appears to have coined the term. A few of these papers have a co-author. These articles are referenced in other papers by Mark Burgin, but otherwise do not seem to be significantly cited.

(3) A monograph by Mark Burgin, Super-recursive algorithms is available from Springer. However, it appears not to have received the benefit of copy-editing by a native English speaker; furthermore, Springer monographs are not peer-reviewed. Amazon.com offers two very brief reviews of this book. One of them is by D.V. Feldman, a mathematician at the University of New Hampshire who, from cursory web searches, seems to contribute quite a few very brief reviews of books on topics outside his specialties. This review says that Super-recursive functions "synthesizes all isolated heresies from the journal literature". The same review also claims that the book is "important"; however, Amazon lists it as about #1,700,000 in sales rank, after over 3 years in print. The other Amazon review is by Vilmar Trevisan. This researcher has a record of publication in areas relating to the design of efficient algorithms for specific purposes (e.g., polynomial factorization), but has not published anything clearly related to the theory of computation per se. His review mentions only that Burgin's book "serves to develop a new paradigm", but mentions no particular groundbreaking results.

In the discussion of this article, the only review mentioned as discussing Super-recursive algorithms at any length was written by Martin Davis, a mathematician who is a recognized authority in the theory of computation. As noted by computer scientist Vaughan Pratt and others in the discussion with some mathematical sophistication, this review's withering sarcasm is, at best, thinly veiled. The main author and defender of this article, Multipundit, might be forgiven for not detecting just how negative Davis' review is, since (by some odd coincidence) Multipundit's grasp of English seems little better than Mark Burgis' in Super-recursive functions.

My personal opinion might seem out of place here, but I have studied some computing theory, and for those who haven't, my perspective might help you understand why establishing notability in this case is likely to be difficult, if not impossible. I have read some of Super-recursive algorithms. Frankly, when I see a definition of super-recursive algorithm as an algorithm capable of computing what Turing machines can't, the next thing I expect to see (in a real computing theory book, anyway) is a rigorous proof that there exists at least one such thing. Extraordinary claims call for extraordinary evidence, and this is a very extraordinary claim. But does Burgin then do the math? No. he appears more likely to refer to obsolete fault-tolerant commercial systems for his existence proofs. I admit I am not an expert in computing theory. I have read a few textbooks on it, and a handful of papers; I took a few courses in it at U.C. Berkeley, and graded homework for those courses a few times. And even this experience was almost three decades ago. However, the style of rigorous mathematical argument in this mathematical specialty is not something one soon forgets, and where Burgin discusses super-recursive algorithms, what little rigor I see is superficial at best.

Wolfgang Pauli once said of a particularly shoddy piece of physics work, "it's not even wrong." From what I can see, Burgin is not even wrong in what he claims about super-recursive functions. And others in a better position than I to judge Burgin's super-recursive functions appear to have -- with one scathing exception -- also agreed this stuff is not even wrong, with their resounding silence: there just isn't a whole lot to say about it. Note that "wrong" doesn't make anything "not notable"; far from it. I could (and have) argued that Lotfi Zadeh was wrong, that Fuzzy Logic was inferior to Bayesian approaches to reasoning under uncertainty. But Fuzzy Logic did become notable, whatever its faults, and from a certain point of view, maybe it's good that it did -- reasoning under uncertainty ("is there any other kind?" someone once quipped) needed a push, and Zadeh gave it that push. (Also, to his credit, he didn't push past any reasonable point, he began yielding gracefully to Bayesianism, if anything.) What has Burgis achieved, except to claim he has some umbrella concept that he can't rigorously describe?

Burgin's super-recursive algorithms have not achieved notability in computing theory, even though they purportedly comprise fuzzy logic systems somehow. Nor have they achieved notability anywhere else, apparently. It's not that Burgin is wrong. It's not even that he's not even wrong. It's that this supposed theory of super-recursive functions is not notably not even wrong. Therefore, even in the narrow and rather obscure discipline of computing theory (which I would contextualize here by noting that Hartley Rogers' lovely classic text is ... well, not even as high as #400,000 in Amazon sales rank), I don't see that we have Wikipedia notability here.

So I say delete. Yakushima (talk) 10:39, 25 May 2008 (UTC)


 * I want to keep the arcticle and to see views and arguments (s. talk page) getting incorporated. --demus wiesbaden (talk) 17:16, 25 May 2008 (UTC)
 * If you want to keep it, help make a solid case for notability Yakushima (talk) 04:42, 26 May 2008 (UTC)

Weak delete. Initially I thought there couldn't be notability problems with a Springer book by a UCLA professor. But now I know more, especially after several altercations involving editor Multipundit from UCLA who, I still hope (because of Multipundit's general cluelessness in what should be Burgin's area of expertise), is just one of Burgin's undergraduate students and not Burgin himself. It seems that "super-recursive algorithm" is just a fuzzy buzzword, designed to mean everything and nothing. Given that, the negative review by Martin Davis (which seems to be essentially the only real response by mainstream science), and the reaction of Vaughan Pratt to this article and its author, I think deletion of this article as non-notable fringe science is probably justified. "Weak" delete because I am not entirely sure my delete !vote isn't in part due to the wish to get rid of the ridiculous conflict with Multipundit, who either has a severe conflict of interest or a severe obsession with the topic of the article. I will probably make up my mind and change my vote after I have seen other people's comments. --Hans Adler (talk) 17:37, 25 May 2008 (UTC)
 * "... book by a UCLA professor". Atually, it's a monograph, and by a UCLA visiting scholar, not a professor.  If the subject of hyper-recursive algorithms has a claim to fame, I think it's mainly because of a special issue of Theoretical Computer Science (journal) on "Super-recursive algorithms and hypercomputation".  However, that special issue was apparently guest-edited by Burgis and Klinger; I don't think any article in that special issue treats of super-recursive algorithms per se except for the one by Burgis and Klinger.  If an article in a guest-edited journal is written by the guest editors, is it necessarily peer-reviewed?

Merge to hypercomputation as a very short section, per CBM below. --Hans Adler (talk) 11:33, 27 May 2008 (UTC)


 * Keep/merge There seem to be enough citations to pass the notability bar easily. The issue of the topic's correctness or quality are best dealt with on the article's talk page and resolved by editing and/or merger. Colonel Warden (talk) 19:07, 25 May 2008 (UTC)
 * Comment: Look a little more closely at your "enough citations" results, Colonel. Does this count, for example?  I'd say it's more like a Springer advertisement.  How about mere listings in the bibliographies of master's theses?  Or how about this, not even published in a peer-reviewed journal, just available on an academic website, and only asking, at the end, whether it's possible that the result could be obtained by an "inductive Turing machine"?  There's a lot of chaff here, of the kind that can be created by energetically pressing for mentions rather than by doing substantial theoretical work.  Once you've cleared away mentions by authors other than Burgin that aren't significant (and notability guidelines say that more than a mere mention is necessary), the only researchers who seem to be persistently using the term "super-recursive algorithm" are Mark Burgin and the occasional co-author.  (And in the case of co-authored papers, I have yet to look closely to see if the term gets more than a mere mention.)  In one book, a 70-year retrospective on the Church-Turing thesis, Burgin gets a laugh-out-loud quote in one paper that dismisses hypercomputation as ultimately reliant on infinite computing power.  The only other paper to mention him defends him stridently, but elsewhere says that calculus, and other parts of mathematics, would "disappear" if the set-theoretic foundations of mathematics were sufficiently eroded.  (Well, that's odd -- calculus preceded set theory, IIRC, and I've met people who got quite fluent in calculus who didn't have much, if any, exposure to set theory.) Who takes super-recursive algorithms seriously, and are they actualy computer scientists who have done, and are doing, serious theoretical work on them under that name? Yakushima (talk) 03:04, 26 May 2008 (UTC)
 * You're reaching. My opinion stands. Colonel Warden (talk) 06:12, 26 May 2008 (UTC)
 * * You might be mistaking "actually trying" for "reaching". Do you actually know the subject area at all? Yakushima (talk) 14:09, 26 May 2008 (UTC)


 *  Weak keep . It may be "fringey" and not very notable, but still notable enough IMO. There are citations by third parties, and the fact that Springer decided to publish the monograph suggests to me that at least the editors there decided it was notable enough to print. As far as I know, Springer is not a vanity press but a reasonably respectable scientific publisher. --Itub (talk) 08:27, 26 May 2008 (UTC)
 * Comment: I encourage you to go to Amazon "search inside" for this book and try reading some of it. There are clearly longish passages that no editor has bothered reading for grammar or sense.  (Maybe the manuscript got a spell-check pass?)
 * Yes, Springer is a reasonably respectable scientific publisher, but that doesn't exclude elements of "vanity press" in its business model. For what Burgis has on offer, you won't find a sucker born every minute -- it is, after all, a computer science title with mathematical symbols in it.  However, in view of the Amazon figures for how many copies are new and used for the rather high price of around $30 (given what rubbish this is), I'd guess there is a sucker of the required type born perhaps once a week.
 * Get your own taste of the drivel, here. The question isn't "How can it be so bad if Springer will publish it?"  Rather, it's "What's happening at Springer that they would even bother to read 10 pages of something like this, much less print it?"  I'd say that what's happening at Springer is that they (like many publishers) now have ways to get something into print with very low overhead, compared to the bad old days when you had to pay a union wage for a typesetter skilled enough to set mathematical type accurately. Yakushima (talk) 14:09, 26 May 2008 (UTC)
 * Oops, sorry, ltub -- I should have looked at your user page before commenting. You don't have a computer science background, do you?  I guess if I were coming from chemistry, as you do, and read ten pages of Super-recursive algorithms, I might not notice anything amiss except that I didn't really understand much.
 * By the way, for future reference, "citations by third parties" is not enough for notability. The subject must have been discussed significantly, not merely cited, by third parties, and in reliable sources.  "Reliable" in a scientific context means "peer-reviewed"; Google Scholar is pretty cool, but it's not yet smart enough to tell whether a source is peer-reviewed or not. For example, is Peter Kugel's "It's Time to Think Outside the Computational Box" peer-reviewed?  I'm sure an editor or two looked at it, and thought it would amusing for CACM readers.  But if you took Kugel's name off it, and tried to run as a research contribution through the gauntlet of theoretical computer science peer-review, it wouldn't pass muster.  Kugel's case in point of "super-recursive algorithms" is Programming by example.  There are no algorithms in the field of PBE that can't also be run on a Turing machine.  Kugel offers up Burgis' bogus "proof" that Turing machines can solve the halting problem.  As someone with a computer science education, my first lip-curling reaction is "Who the hell is this guy?  He can't have had a proper education in computing theory!"  And, in fact, there is nothing in Kugel's publications to suggest that he's ever even taken a course in the subject, much less taught one.  It looks to me like he got tenure a long time ago, before the CS field had a well-formed curriculum, and kicked back for a career of writing mildly controversial op-eds in the AI field and musing about computers in education.
 * Challenge to everyone here: give me one peer-reviewed publication on super-recursive algorithms. Just one. Yakushima (talk) 14:16, 26 May 2008 (UTC)
 * Merge as suggested by Hans Adler. In reply to Yakushima and Firefly, I believe you that this term is probably BS, but that doesn't make it automatically non-notable. I certainly don't think that the negligence of Springer when it comes to copy-editing is a factor to take into account. And I don't agree with the suggestion that only peer-reviewed references count. What matters is the reputability of the source. There are many crappy peer-reviewed journals and there are many excellent non-peer-reviewed books. But anyway, based on various arguments here and thinking further about it, it does seem like this is "just a fancy buzzword" that hasn't found enough use to deserve its own article but may deserve some mention somewhere else. That'll be up to the editors of hypercomputation. --Itub (talk) 12:05, 27 May 2008 (UTC)
 * Comment The standard I'm applying is this:
 * Material that has been vetted by the scholarly community is regarded as reliable; this means published in peer-reviewed sources, and reviewed and judged acceptable scholarship by the academic journals.
 * That's from WP:RELIABLE, subsection "Scholarship". When Peter Kugel says  in a CACM article that "limiting computation" can "solve" the halting problem, he neglects to mention that the halting problem is defined as giving a yes or no answer in a finite amount of time.  If "vetted by the scholarly community" (or even by a class of CS undergrads in a theory course, looking at this as homework problem #1 - "spot where he's cheating"), this article wouldn't have made it through.  Ergo: it wasn't vetted.  Just because it's in CACM, and some contributions there are vetted doesn't mean that all are.  It appears to be just these sorts of loopholes that Burgin has wormed through to, camouflage his work (to the inexpert or inattentive eye) as peer-reviewed.  I could be wrong.  But I'm still looking for some unambiguously peer-reviewed work on super-recursive algorithms, and nobody here has answered my challenge to identify one.  —Preceding unsigned comment added by Yakushima (talk • contribs) 16:59, 27 May 2008 (UTC)


 * Delete My training in Control theory at instutions as famous as Burgin's UCLA has led me to believe that Cybernetics is MIT's version of pseudo-science. In the Springer book, Burgin mentions Cybernetics and then tries to synthesize economics and computer science with a bit of Control theory. From my perspective, no deep love: art aesthetic or otherwise and a bit of Cybernetic pseudo-science.  As an author, Burgin reminds me Richard Bellman, whose of overall understanding of early modern computer science and control theory is tolerable, but all his pet ideas are intolerable.  Though my respect for User:Colonel Warden and his or her thoughts and works might very well give him or her the power to convince me otherwise, I see no flaws in User:Yakushima's argument.  In fact, these comments are all spot on. --Firefly322 (talk) 14:59, 26 May 2008 (UTC)
 * keep I do not really want to rely on an argument for deletion based upon the assertion that the subject is not important because "Cybernetics is MIT's version of pseudo-science."   I suppose the cybernetics and MIT articles will be proposed for deletion next, along with Norbert Wiener & John von Neumann. I rely on common sense in judging the comments of  expert editors.   DGG (talk) 22:35, 26 May 2008 (UTC)
 * Comment I'm just trying to be honest. Obviously, cybernetics and Norbert Wiener are well established topics that aren't someone's pet publication topic like Super-recursive algorithm.  To suggest that I would propose MIT for AfD is not so cool and totally absurd, which makes me believe that your vote and your comment here is a knee-jerk reaction. --Firefly322 (talk) 23:10, 26 May 2008 (UTC)
 * yes, a slight exaggeration, but we should not delete  based upon that the work is not actually of high quality fundamentally. Not the role of Wikipedia, to decide on the academic quality of work in a subject, if there are good references to standard peer-reviewed journals. There's a lot of stuff i personally thing over-exaggerated narrowly-focused studies in Wikipedia that I wouldnt accept as a peer-reviewer, but the question is whether here are references show that people consider it important. This isnt academic peer-review. DGG (talk) 00:27, 27 May 2008 (UTC)
 * Comment: Actually, DGG, what you offered wasn't a "slight exaggeration", it was simply wrong. Firefly322 made a comment that you apparently interpreted as being of the form "I don't like topic X, topic Y is no better than topic X, therefore topic Y should not have a Wikipedia article." Firefly322 might fairly be accused of a not-very-useful editorial digression.  However, AgF requires that I view Firefly322's submission as being on topic for this page if his/her conclusion supports that view; this discussion is about whether there should be an article on super-recursive algorithms; Firefly322's conclusion was that he/she agrees with what I've written, and what I've written here is a case (with its own editorial digressions, admittedly) fundamentally based on the claim that the topic hasn't achieved notability in the theory of computation because there isn't be any peer-reviewed work on it.  There may appear to be peer-reviewed work, but so far, I haven't seen any.


 * DGG, although you have no apparent computer science credentials, you are a librarian. With skills like yours, you could be more useful than any of the rest of us here, on a specific question very relevant to the deletion issue: is there an independent, peer-reviewed publication on the topic of super-recursive algorithms?  As a librarian, you must be aware of the distinctions involved.
 * If you're game, let me help you get started. Last I checked, CACM is peer-reviewed; however, it consists largely of what passes for light topical reading among computer scientists, and not all articles in it are necessarily vetted by experts in the article's topic.  Thus, Peter Kugel's defense of super-recursive algorithms in an issue of CACM doesn't, in itself, make super-recursive algorithms a formally recognized topic in computer science; from what I can see, it is little more than an off-the-cuff comment (one of many in a career apparently consisting of little else) from a computer scientist who is more of a gadfly than a serious researcher; moreover it is an off-the-cuff comment with at least one serious and glaring technical error in it.  Nor would 10 such articles by 10 such authors necessarily establish the topic as legitimate within theoretical computer science.  And without such support from within the field itself, you either have to look for significant notability (i.e., more than just a mention) somewhere in the popular press instead, or take very seriously the proposition that the topic is, at best, better covered as fringe theory, to be discussed in some other Wikipedia article, but not at a length that suggests it is being given undue weight. Yakushima (talk) 03:29, 27 May 2008 (UTC)


 * Delete The article is too unfocused to judge what it is about.  It begins with a long list of examples of "algorithms that are more powerful than Turing machines."  That topic is already covered by the article on hypercomputation.  The rest of the article focuses on a single class of such examples, namely inductive Turing machines, which the article distinguishes from an ordinary Turing machine as not having to stop after producing its result.  While this vague notion could mean various things, judging by the article's reference to Gold it most likely refers to the concept treated in Language identification in the limit discovered by Gold in 1967 and rediscovered by Burgin in the 1980s.  Burgin does not make clear whether he wants "super-recursive algorithm" to be the new name for hypercomputation, language identification in the limit, or something in between.  In any event no one but Burgin and the two anonymous Wikipedia editors of the article have found any use for the term, making WP:FRINGE the applicable guideline.  The controversy is not notable outside Wikipedia (there is nothing controversial about Martin Davis's negative review) whence my recommendation to delete.  --Vaughan Pratt (talk) 03:08, 27 May 2008 (UTC)


 * Merge to hypercomputation as a very short section. When this article was originally created, I spent a significant amount of time investigating it. I obtained a copy of Burgin's book and browsed through some of his papers. I looked up the reviews of Burgin's book and added them as references to the article. After all this, I think I have a vague sense of what Burgin means by superrecursive algorithm (one difficulty is that Burgin's text is not as precise as a text in recursion theory would ordinarily be). I also found that Burgin's book spends most of its pages summarizing of other people's work. Essentially the only new content is Burgin's model of hypercomputation, the inductive Turing machine, and his terminology "super-recursive algorithms".  After doing all this research in an attempt to make the article somewhat reasonable, my opinion has become there is nothing here that cannot be adequately covered in a few sentences of the article on hypercomputation. It isn't our role on Wikipedia to predict whether Burgin's terminology will ever become popular. At the moment, it certainly is not used by any other recursion theory text, and as rare terminology it shuld be given a brief mention but not an independent article. &mdash; Carl (CBM · talk) 11:13, 27 May 2008 (UTC)
 * Thanks for all the time you have invested into this and for proposing a very sensible option. --Hans Adler (talk) 11:33, 27 May 2008 (UTC)
 * Is it now safe to assume that there's no more need to look closely at sources to see if they are peer-reviewed in any meaningful sense? I really have no appetite for continuing with that task.  Besides, it doesn't look like the search will produce results, except perhaps in some "super-recursive algorithm" sense of "results". Yakushima (talk) 17:17, 27 May 2008 (UTC)
 * Carl, I went back and forth between "delete" and "merge", the latter exactly as you propose. I'm fine with either, but with a slight preference for "delete."  This is because it wasn't clear to me what "hypercomputation" should be about.  Most of recursion theory arguably falls under hypercomputation.  On the other hand theoretical computer science has moved far beyond the 1960's conception of computation as modeled by recursion theory, whose distinctions are based on computable sets and functions, dealing nowadays with probability, concurrency, game theory, quantum information, etc., all of which can be considered "hypercomputation."  So there is at least the potential for the hypercomputation article to be about a wide range of legitimate research of generally acknowledged quality, without feeling obliged to also list all the muddle-headed thinking.  By way of calibration look at the faster than light article, which gives a fair and detached assessment of a variety of ways of breaking that speed limit while stopping short of including the considerably body of confused thinking, bad exposition, and/or pseudoscience in the field, see the article's talk page where that boundary is fought over. (Incidentally I don't see what if anything Burgin's notion of inductive Turing machine adds to Gold's notion of language identification in the limit, which in any event has been largely supplanted today by more versatile learning models such as PAC learning.  Whereas a number of researchers have expanded on Gold's original notion, no one has seen fit to follow up on Burgin's variant of it, assuming it's even a variant.)  --Vaughan Pratt (talk) 17:54, 27 May 2008 (UTC)
 * Merge some vestige of this article into "hypercomputation", and you've got vestiges spread around, only a little more widely (try a poke at "what links here"). Still, you might as well. I'm not on some crusade to scrub Wikipedia of every mention.  It's enough to get "due weight".


 * There will probably always be several mentions. Burgin discusses this topic using the terms "algorithm", "Turing machine", "inductive inference", "recursive function", etc., etc., and thus almost any of those Wikipedia articles might be targeted.  Some have been; Multipundit was pretty busy.  As coverage of logic and computing theory grows in Wikipedia (what?! no article yet on the subrecursive hierarchy!?), the number of, um, "receptor sites" will only increase.  But can't we count on the vigilance of the editors of those articles?


 * As for hypercomputation, the category seems problematic. But so is, for example, AIDS origins opposed to scientific consensus, which includes theories ranging from those of Leonard Horowitz (shorter form: AIDS is a genocidal plot!) to those of Paul Farmer (shorter form: Haitians got targeted as inward HIV vector by Americans, even though HIV more likely moved from the U.S. to Haiti.)  Obviously, it's a stretch to conflate "extra-national origins of HIV infection in a particular country" with "origins of HIV, period".  Especially when it gives roughly equal weight to the epidemiological views of both a paranoid quack and a medical saint.  But that's the beauty of vagueness, isn't it?


 * Hypercomputation: what is it, exactly? Who really knows?  I just know that, with ten times more Google results coming back for "hypercomputation" than for "superrecursive function", I'm not going to try to fight it.  Let's say the article for hypercomputation gives roughly equal weight to quantum computing, language identification in the limit, and "super-recursive algorithm".  Readers will notice that the article doesn't say nearly enough to confer much understanding of the first two topics, but at least links to expanded treatments of them, and that it apparently says just about all that can really be said for sure about the last topic. That's about as good as you can expect, under the circumstances.  Yakushima (talk) 04:39, 28 May 2008 (UTC)


 * Actually, there are only 5 non-redirect articles that link to super-recursive algorithms, and I think each of them does have due weight in the context of that article. I double-checked them a while ago. I appreciate Vaughan's point, which is why I think that only a very short part should be merged into the hypercomputation article, not the entire article here. I agree with Yakushima that due weight is the best goal to work towards. &mdash; Carl (CBM · talk) 23:56, 28 May 2008 (UTC)
 * You saw due weight in all five? Even inductive inference?  More than half of the main text there is unsourced statements that don't make it clear where Gold's contributions leave off and Burgin's pick up.  (Anyway, as Vaughan Pratt pointed out, it's not clear the Burgin did more than what we see in Gold's language identification in the limit.) And yes, this is Multipundit again. Yakushima (talk) 15:50, 29 May 2008 (UTC)

I am not going to argue here whether to keep or to delete the article. If those who make decisions here base their decisions on grounded scientific arguments, they will keep the article. If they take into account only those who shout louder and are more aggressive, they will delete the article because the user Yakushima throws his ungrounded, as a rule, irrelevant and amateurish accusations with such intensity that nobody will be able to compete with such aggressive ignorance.

However, I would like to show to what low level of discussion Yakushima takes all of those who participate in this discussion. One example: mathematician Martin Davis saw mathematics in Burgin’s works, while Yakushima, admitting that he is not an expert in computing theory (actually, according to his resume, he was not able to get even the lowest degree, BS in computer science), cannot see this mathematics. One more example: Yakushima attacks fuzzy logic, an established mathematical theory with a lot of applications. One more example: in his contribution to the discussion (26 May, 2008), Yakushima suggests to “watch the proposed Turing machine to see if it has halted yet.” It would be interesting to know how Yakushima will watch when the Turing machine will need to do 10 to power 100 steps to halt. Thus, it is not a coincidence that Yakushima cannot understand how inductive Turing machine work and how they solve the halting problem. By the way, what Yakushima writes about the halting problem is also incorrect. It is possible to continue such examples that show complete incompetence of Yakushima, but it’s not worth spending time on such an aggressive ignorance. It’s clear why Yakushima is not interested in a scientific discussion because ignorance detests scholarly discourse. However, it would be interesting to know why Yakushima is so aggressive and searches compromising data on those who he attacks.

What concerns the vote of Pratt to delete the article, it’s very clear why he strives to achieve this. Discussion related to article exposed very low logical proficiency of Pratt. Really, how we can call a person who in one sentence can make three mistakes. So, if the article would be deleted, the discussion also goes away and Pratt can continue to pretend that he is somebody like a logician. Multipundit (talk) 01:23, 29 May 2008 (UTC)

Just a quick reply before we close out here. Multipundit wonders: "It would be interesting to know how Yakushima will watch when the Turing machine will need to do 10 to power 100 steps to halt." I have actually cooked up some Turing machines in my lab that clock in at well over 1.0e+100 Hz, fast enough for even my gnat-like attention span. However, this speedup requires a special-purpose patent-pending hardware acceleration technique. I was calling it "super-recursive alchemism" in early patent drafts, until my attorney alerted me to a possible litigation risk because of certain similarities to certain other competing concepts, in both my terminology and my obscurantist references to theoretical computer science. For now, my Powerpoint slides call it "ultra-effective comprehensionalism", until I, my lawyer, and numerous Wikipedia meatpuppet allies can get all potential usurpers thoroughly discredited and my own idea established. It's taking a little longer than I thought, though. And that's a pity because I really want to get back to the lab and see how much higher I can crank the clock rate on my improved Turing machines when I stick them in the freezer.

Anyway, Multipundit, please don't tell Mark Burgin what I'm up to, OK? Keep quiet and I'll cut you in on founders stock, and maybe I'll even buy you some recently minted credentials at American Biographical Institute, like he's got. I'll give you even more stock if you can find the proofs for any of the theorems in Burgin's "Superrecursive Features of Interactive Computation". Six theorems but no proofs? If it were one missing proof, I'd say this might have been accidental -- there's many a slip from the cup to the lip, eh? He just copied but neglected to paste. Happens to me all the time. But six times? And only the proofs, nothing else? That's no mere coincidence. He's hiding something, no doubt in my mind. And if I can find out what it is, I might be able to get transfinite clock rates on my Turing machine accelerator. Then I'll be worth billions, and like Gates, Jobs and Wozniak, nobody will care that I never got my BS in CS, because I'll have more BS in CS than anybody else alive. Yakushima (talk) 11:19, 29 May 2008 (UTC)

Multipundit and Yakushima, can you please stop the personal attacks against each other or any third persons? Both of you? It's ineffective, and it's against policy. Thank you for your cooperation. --Hans Adler (talk) 12:20, 29 May 2008 (UTC)


 * Hans, thanks for pointing out this out -- it helped me see that I've actually said something incorrect and potentially damaging about a third person. This was actually just a factual error on my part, but that's no excuse.  Accordingly, I'd like to apologize to this person, right here, and offer a correction.  Actually, Steve Wozniak did get a BS in CS, after Apple.  How could I have forgotten that?  He studied in the same CS department I did (though it was both before and after my time.)  Steve, if you're reading this: I'm sorry.  Really sorry.

Hi, I have not read the article, so I don't know if it should be deleted or not. I just want to say that this article has been put as an example in the Wikipedia manual of style, and that's how I arrived to it. See Citing_sources. So either the article remains for the reason of being an example (not judging about the validity of its contents), or a new example should be found for the manual of style. Thanks. Pmronchi (talk) 13:26, 29 May 2008 (UTC).


 * The above discussion is preserved as an archive of the debate. Please do not modify it. Subsequent comments should be made on the appropriate discussion page (such as the article's talk page or in a deletion review). No further edits should be made to this page.