- Dec 16, 2015
- 2,806
- 6,088
After seeing @jonny1000 state that he would want to run BU if it would support setting AD to infinity [1], I wonder if there is enough interest for an "Infinity Edition" of BU (or at least a patch to that effect).
It seems straightforward to implement - accept some parameter value that will represent infinity, and output something signifying infinity in the user agent (and optionally coinbase - there is some ongoing discussion about whether signalling AD in coinbase is useful and perhaps should be removed by default / made optional).
Testing of AD=infinity can restrict itself to checking that the parameter value is accepted and signaled. No need to test whether it actually accepts infinite depth because "ain't nobody got time for that" [2], and even if they did they'd need to show that they'd have space for it (which would take an infinite amount of time to verify - see [2]).
Maybe such a patch could be crowd-funded instead of expending existing BU funds.
Perhaps it this were implemented it could increase acceptance of BU to beyond [3] its current levels.
The risks of such a setting appear very limited, since BU already supports very large values of AD.
But to be clear, what we are talking about here is supporting only the smallest ordinal infinity - nothing beyond that.
---
[1] this Reddit post
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Halting_problem
[3] "To infinity and beyond"
[4] Mu is meant in here in this sense.
It seems straightforward to implement - accept some parameter value that will represent infinity, and output something signifying infinity in the user agent (and optionally coinbase - there is some ongoing discussion about whether signalling AD in coinbase is useful and perhaps should be removed by default / made optional).
Testing of AD=infinity can restrict itself to checking that the parameter value is accepted and signaled. No need to test whether it actually accepts infinite depth because "ain't nobody got time for that" [2], and even if they did they'd need to show that they'd have space for it (which would take an infinite amount of time to verify - see [2]).
Maybe such a patch could be crowd-funded instead of expending existing BU funds.
Perhaps it this were implemented it could increase acceptance of BU to beyond [3] its current levels.
The risks of such a setting appear very limited, since BU already supports very large values of AD.
But to be clear, what we are talking about here is supporting only the smallest ordinal infinity - nothing beyond that.
---
[1] this Reddit post
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Halting_problem
[3] "To infinity and beyond"
[4] Mu is meant in here in this sense.
Last edited:
