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lanstin an hour ago

Diophantine equations are as they say Turing complete. That is for any question about does this Turing machine with this tape halt with a certain value there is a corresponding Diophantine equation, which has solutions if the machine halts with the output corresponding to the values it is solved by. I think this paper covers it for register machines rather than Turing machines directly: https://carleton.ca/math/wp-content/uploads/Nick-Murphy-Hono...

boxfire 26 minutes ago | parent | next [-]

This is not bidirectional. The Davis-Putnam-Robinson-Matiyasevich theorem shows we can make a Diophantine equation that acts as a universal Turing machine, but there’s Diophantine equations that cannot be solved by Turing machines:

https://www.nlp-kyle.com/post/number_computability/

The smallest known Diophantine equation that cannot be solved by any Turing machine last I checked had ~8000 states as a Turing machine. This Turing machine cannot be decided to halt, and if it does halt in finite time then an (outer) Turing machine could execute it to predict that, so this lives beyond decidability:

https://scottaaronson.blog/?p=2725

I find it annoying that the response to this from the Chaitain perspective is to throw your hands in the air and say not all of math is predictable and let “equivalent to halting decidability” be the death of effort. There’s a richer field of ‘hypercomputation’ sitting beyond the pale, and I believe it will be topological applications that untwist this knot [pun intended]. I’m excited for the post Turing world but i dare say I won’t live to see it.

gregfjohnson 26 minutes ago | parent | prev [-]

It is a surprising and delightful consequence of this observation that there is a polynomial whose integer-valued roots are exactly the set of all prime numbers.