Every study conducted on "are we alone" conluded the odds are improbable of us being the only intelligent species in the universe. We're just amateurs at hiding because we're not at war with other planets...yet.
Ah, but there's a difference between 'intelligent species' and 'technical civilization'. I have no doubt that there are other 'intelligent species' out there. I see it as being likely there are incredibly few 'technical civilizations' out there spread across the universe.
Assuming a situation where a civilization would be 'at war with other planets' assumes that two (or more) technical civilizations at comparable levels of technical skill, relatively close in travel time to one another, and hostile to each other exist. This is highly improbable, even if there are many many technical civilizations out there that are 'hiding'. Not to mention machine civilizations.
There's means to make P = NP by using random, external seeds. Most computers today use the time as a random seed but as we all know, that's not exactly random. I wouldn't be surprised if someone, somewhere out there has made a random seed chip using a crystal or some such but in general applications, a dedicated randomizer is not necessary.
I'll take your word for it, you undoubtedly know more about it than I do.
So, you're saying that you need a 'randomized seed' of suitably high complexity to make P=NP. A jump start? Well, that's interesting but P=NP has still not been proven and the $1 million prize is still up for grabs.
And by the way, "sentients" is rarely "creative." If you write a program to account for all the possibilities, it is quite easy to predict which choice a sentient will prefer by weighting each against personality.
True, sentients are rarely creative. Or do you mean 'spectacularly creative' as in 'strokes of genius'? I would say that every sentient, regardless of how intelligent they are exhibits some level of creativity.
OK, your second sentence gives the standard programmer's reply taken to infinite boundaries.
Nothing can be definitively stated by resorting to absolute points of view, it's essentially just bravado.
Yes, a program can be coded to do as many things as you want it to do within the limits of your intelligence and ability to oversee its overall structure. But that is still finite and limited, ultimately, to a subset of the intelligence and ability of the programmer(s) who created it. Even some kind of neural net programmed in a way that you hint at would be ultimately limited by its original coding, done by humans ---- unless P=NP and that neural net can make the creative leap(s) necessary to initiate self-improvement.
There's a problem here I know. Humans can obviously make creative leaps of one kind or another, and arguably, so can other animals that meet the criteria for some kind of minimal sentience. This suggests that P=NP, since we can do it to varying degrees.
To me, and apparently to some others, it seems like P=NP is not possible, logically. And yet, our sentience says that it is possible. A seeming paradox.
In my opinion, which I'm fully aware may be completely wrong, we are not able to create (or initiate the creation of) a 'random seed' of suitable complexity to spark sentience in a set of algorithms running on a machine; that random seed would be, in a very real sense, indirectly, a subset of our own complexity -- which somehow allows us to make the creative leap -- which may not be enough for our algorithmic creation(s).
