So, there I was, trying to remember the title of a book I had read bits of, and I thought to check a Wikipedia article that might have referred to it. And there, in “External links”, was … “Wikiversity hosts a discussion with the Bard chatbot on Quantum mechanics”.
How much carbon did you have to burn, and how many Kenyan workers did you have to call the N-word, in order to get a garbled and confused “history” of science? (There’s a lot wrong and even self-contradictory with what the stochastic parrot says, which isn’t worth unweaving in detail; perhaps the worst part is that its statement of the uncertainty principle is a blurry JPEG of the average over all verbal statements of the uncertainty principle, most of which are wrong.) So, a mediocre but mostly unremarkable page gets supplemented with a “resource” that is actively harmful. Hooray.
Meanwhile, over in this discussion thread, we’ve been taking a look at the Wikipedia article Super-recursive algorithm. It’s rambling and unclear, throwing together all sorts of things that somebody somewhere called an exotic kind of computation, while seemingly not grasping the basics of the ordinary theory the new thing is supposedly moving beyond.
So: What’s the worst/weirdest Wikipedia article in your field of specialization?
Computer scientists have explored what happens if you give Turing machines more power and it turns out you get an infinite hierarchy of more complex halting problems, each of which unsolvable with the type of machine it asks about. It’s fascinating, really, as is the logical counterpart the arithemtical hierarchy. Stuff like this is what drew me into theoretical CS in the first place.
The “super-recursive” article is a mockery of this field and basically reads like a personal insult. I can finally experience what medical experts feel when reading antivax nonsense.
Yes, we call that hypercomputation nowadays I think, I had read about the concept when it was stilled called hyperturing or superturing or something, and the theorethical ‘how do we go up a halting level’ methods included a semi joke such as ‘an oracle which just gives you the correct answer’ (which I guess comes from some of the stranger quantum mechanics theories at the times).
This super-recursive stuff just feels to me like they grabbed onto the wrong parts of the earlier research (as a theorethical concept the oracle isn’t a problem, if you are just listing all the valid methods no matter how viable they are). I never was that much into theoretical CS but it was an eyeopener, and interesting at the time.
So your knowledge about this is prob way bigger than mine and sorry for not using the correct terms.