Kizeral

Welcome

I'm glad to see you're excited about helping improve the Wikipedia articles on algorithms. You may be interested in a list of resources for Mathematics editors on Wikipedia. The math wikiproject is a good place to find other editors interested in mathematics articles.

At Wikipedia, we have a policy on neutral point of view that guides our article content. One facet of this policy is that viewpoints that are held by only a small number of people are given due weight in articles. The idea that super-recursive algorithms disprove Church's thesis is such a viewpoint.

I think that the idea of a super-recursive algorithm article is very good. As Burgin's ideas become more widely known, people will want to read about them here. However, because they are not yet widely shared, it would be undue weight to include them in every article about algorithms. They should definitely be discussed, with perspective, in the article on Church's thesis itself, and in the article about super-recursive algorithms. — Carl (CBM · talk) 20:09, 7 February 2008 (UTC)

I removed a rather strong claim about this from the hypercomputation article but maybe it could be re-inserted if worded more carefully. 207.241.238.233 (talk) 08:38, 8 February 2008 (UTC)

Welcome (2)

Welcome to Wikipedia, and sorry for the somewhat rough start. Refutation of the Church-Turing thesis is a strong and exceptional claim, and to protect the integrity of Wikipedia (not that we have much of that, but we are always working on it), we have a rule that exceptional claims require exceptional sources. Wikipedia is currently not trying to cover new scientific developments faster than the scientific community digests them; that's because it is procedurally very hard to distinguish groundbreaking new research from fringe ideas.

In case you are interested: Personally I find the claim that the theory of super-recursive algorithms refutes the CTT more plausible since I have read Martin Davis' "Consensus and Opposition", which reminded me of the weaknesses that are already present in our current concept of algorithms: the assumed availability of infinite time and space. It might be that it's time for a paradigm shift. But I am not sure that it's fair to phrase it as a refutation of CTT. And to tell the truth, I am also not sure that a paradigm shift shouldn't go in the other direction, towards PTIME or PSPACE. --Hans Adler (talk) 21:23, 7 February 2008 (UTC)