| ▲ | feoren 3 hours ago | |
> 1 + 1/2 + 1/4 + 1/8 ... = 2 It's not necessarily clear that this statement requires infinity, if you're willing to treat "... =" as a shorthand. You might prefer something like "1 + 1/2 + 1/4 + 1/8 ... -> 2" if it's more clear, where "->" means something like "gets as close as you like without ever getting further away than that", but really the "=" sign is already overloaded in all sorts of subtly different ways anyway, so there's not really any trouble using it here. Almost any rigorous definition you can write down of exactly what that statement means would not rely on the use of infinity. | ||
| ▲ | Animats 3 hours ago | parent [-] | |
See this introduction to limits.[1] If you allow infinite recursion, you soon get to Godel and undecidable problems. Finite deterministic systems are decidable, because you can in principle enumerate all the states. The halting problem is decidable for deterministic systems with finite memory. It may be exponentially hard for some programs, but that's quite different from being undecidable. (This is too long a subject to discuss here, and I haven't worked on constructive mathematics in many years. It's more practical than it was decades ago. You need power tools, which we now have.) | ||