FOM: Chaitin

[Raatikainen Panu A K]

On 16 Mar 01, at 10:01, charles silver wrote:

>     Are you the person who recently published an article debunking
> Chaitin's celebrated Godel-like theorem?   And, if so, I wondered
> whether you've received any response from him disputing your
> interpretation of his result.

RE: Yes, that's me. And yes, we had a short round of e-mail 
exchange with Chaitin on my first paper in JPL (Vol 27, No 6, Dec. 
1998) on Chaitin's earlier incompleteness result. I found his reply 
rather unsatisfying, being at odds with the facts of recursive 
function theory. But there is also a second paper by me in 
SYNTHESE Vol. 123 (2000) on Chaitin's later work on halting 
probability Omega etc. I have not received any responses to that. 
But anyway, I think I was just pointing out several logical facts 
challenging the standard interpretation of that work.

I would be very interested to discuss these issues, if there are 
people in FOM interested in them.


Panu