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Super-recursive algorithm

Super-recursive algorithm (edit | talk | history | protect | delete | links | watch | logs | views) (delete) – (View log)

See below for reasons, I am just trying to correct the form of this nomination Hans Adler (talk) 17:15, 25 May 2008 (UTC)[reply]

I don't believe this article clears the bar for notability.

Here is where I have looked for the obvious evidence:

(1) Google book search: Super-recursive algorithms are very briefly mentioned in a few books that (so far, in my searches) show little evidence of actually exploring the topic under that name. These mentions seem to be confined to the kind of kitchen-sink listing of vaguely related work that a serious author might only bother with up-front in order to preempt being bombarded much later by people asking why their work wasn't mentioned.

(2) Peer reviewed literature: Super-recursive algorithms are discussed at length in papers written by Mark Burgin, who appears to have coined the term. A few of these papers have a co-author. These articles are referenced in other papers by Mark Burgin, but otherwise do not seem to be significantly cited.

(3) A monograph by Mark Burgin, Super-recursive algorithms is available from Springer. However, it appears not to have received the benefit of copy-editing by a native English speaker; furthermore, Springer monographs are not peer-reviewed. Amazon.com offers two very brief reviews of this book. One of them is by D.V. Feldman, a mathematician at the University of New Hampshire who, from cursory web searches, seems to contribute quite a few very brief reviews of books on topics outside his specialties. This review says that Super-recursive functions "synthesizes all isolated heresies from the journal literature". The same review also claims that the book is "important"; however, Amazon lists it as about #1,700,000 in sales rank, after over 3 years in print. The other Amazon review is by Vilmar Trevisan. This researcher has a record of publication in areas relating to the design of efficient algorithms for specific purposes (e.g., polynomial factorization), but has not published anything clearly related to the theory of computation per se. His review mentions only that Burgin's book "serves to develop a new paradigm", but mentions no particular groundbreaking results.

In the discussion of this article, the only review mentioned as discussing Super-recursive algorithms at any length was written by Martin Davis, a mathematician who is a recognized authority in the theory of computation. As noted by computer scientist Vaughan Pratt and others in the discussion with some mathematical sophistication, this review's withering sarcasm is, at best, thinly veiled. The main author and defender of this article, Multipundit, might be forgiven for not detecting just how negative Davis' review is, since (by some odd coincidence) Multipundit's grasp of English seems little better than Mark Burgis' in Super-recursive functions.

My personal opinion might seem out of place here, but I have studied some computing theory, and for those who haven't, my perspective might help you understand why establishing notability in this case is likely to be difficult, if not impossible. I have read some of Super-recursive algorithms. Frankly, when I see a definition of super-recursive algorithm as an algorithm capable of computing what Turing machines can't, the next thing I expect to see (in a real computing theory book, anyway) is a rigorous proof that there exists at least one such thing. Extraordinary claims call for extraordinary evidence, and this is a very extraordinary claim. But does Burgin then do the math? No. he appears more likely to refer to obsolete fault-tolerant commercial systems for his existence proofs. I admit I am not an expert in computing theory. I have read a few textbooks on it, and a handful of papers; I took a few courses in it at U.C. Berkeley, and graded homework for those courses a few times. And even this experience was almost three decades ago. However, the style of rigorous mathematical argument in this mathematical specialty is not something one soon forgets, and where Burgin discusses super-recursive algorithms, what little rigor I see is superficial at best.

Wolfgang Pauli once said of a particularly shoddy piece of physics work, "it's not even wrong." From what I can see, Burgin is not even wrong in what he claims about super-recursive functions. And others in a better position than I to judge Burgin's super-recursive functions appear to have -- with one scathing exception -- also agreed this stuff is not even wrong, with their resounding silence: there just isn't a whole lot to say about it. Note that "wrong" doesn't make anything "not notable"; far from it. I could (and have) argued that Lotfi Zadeh was wrong, that Fuzzy Logic was inferior to Bayesian approaches to reasoning under uncertainty. But Fuzzy Logic did become notable, whatever its faults, and from a certain point of view, maybe it's good that it did -- reasoning under uncertainty ("is there any other kind?" someone once quipped) needed a push, and Zadeh gave it that push. (Also, to his credit, he didn't push past any reasonable point, he began yielding gracefully to Bayesianism, if anything.) What has Burgis achieved, except to claim he has some umbrella concept that he can't rigorously describe?

Burgin's super-recursive algorithms have not achieved notability in computing theory, even though they purportedly comprise fuzzy logic systems somehow. Nor have they achieved notability anywhere else, apparently. It's not that Burgin is wrong. It's not even that he's not even wrong. It's that this supposed theory of super-recursive functions is not notably not even wrong. Therefore, even in the narrow and rather obscure discipline of computing theory (which I would contextualize here by noting that Hartley Rogers' lovely classic text is ... well, not even as high as #400,000 in Amazon sales rank), I don't see that we have Wikipedia notability here.

So I say delete. Yakushima (talk) 10:39, 25 May 2008 (UTC)[reply]

I want to keep the arcticle and to see views and arguments (s. talk page) getting incorporated. --demus wiesbaden (talk) 17:16, 25 May 2008 (UTC)[reply]
If you want to keep it, help make a solid case for notability Yakushima (talk) 04:42, 26 May 2008 (UTC)[reply]

Weak delete. Initially I thought there couldn't be notability problems with a Springer book by a UCLA professor. But now I know more, especially after several altercations involving editor Multipundit from UCLA who, I still hope (because of Multipundit's general cluelessness in what should be Burgin's area of expertise), is just one of Burgin's undergraduate students and not Burgin himself. It seems that "super-recursive algorithm" is just a fuzzy buzzword, designed to mean everything and nothing. Given that, the negative review by Martin Davis (which seems to be essentially the only real response by mainstream science), and the reaction of Vaughan Pratt to this article and its author, I think deletion of this article as non-notable fringe science is probably justified. "Weak" delete because I am not entirely sure my delete !vote isn't in part due to the wish to get rid of the ridiculous conflict with Multipundit, who either has a severe conflict of interest or a severe obsession with the topic of the article. I will probably make up my mind and change my vote after I have seen other people's comments. --Hans Adler (talk) 17:37, 25 May 2008 (UTC)[reply]

"... book by a UCLA professor". Atually, it's a monograph, and by a UCLA visiting scholar, not a professor. If the subject of hyper-recursive algorithms has a claim to fame, I think it's mainly because of a special issue of Theoretical Computer Science (journal) on "Super-recursive algorithms and hypercomputation"[1]. However, that special issue was apparently guest-edited by Burgis and Klinger; I don't think any article in that special issue treats of super-recursive algorithms per se except for the one by Burgis and Klinger. If an article in a guest-edited journal is written by the guest editors, is it necessarily peer-reviewed?
Look a little more closely at your "enough citations" results, Colonel. Does this count, for example? I'd say it's more like a Springer advertisement. How about mere listings in the bibliographies of master's theses? Or how about this, not even published in a peer-reviewed journal, just available on an academic website, and only asking, at the end, whether it's possible that the result could be obtained by an "inductive Turing machine"? There's a lot of chaff here, of the kind that can be created by energetically pressing for mentions rather than by doing substantial theoretical work. Once you've cleared away mentions by authors other than Burgin that aren't significant (and notability guidelines say that more than a mere mention is necessary), the only researchers who seem to be persistently using the term "super-recursive algorithm" are Mark Burgin and the occasional co-author. (And in the case of co-authored papers, I have yet to look closely to see if the term gets more than a mere mention.) In one book, a 70-year retrospective on the Church-Turing thesis, Burgin gets a laugh-out-loud quote in one paper that dismisses hypercomputation as ultimately reliant on infinite computing power. The only other paper to mention him defends him stridently, but elsewhere says that calculus, and other parts of mathematics, would "disappear" if the set-theoretic foundations of mathematics were sufficiently eroded. (Well, that's odd -- calculus preceded set theory, IIRC, and I've met people who got quite fluent in calculus who didn't have much, if any, exposure to set theory.) Who takes super-recursive algorithms seriously, and are they actualy computer scientists who have done, and are doing, serious theoretical work on them under that name? Yakushima (talk) 03:04, 26 May 2008 (UTC)[reply]
* You might be mistaking "actually trying" for "reaching". Do you actually know the subject area at all? Yakushima (talk) 14:09, 26 May 2008 (UTC)[reply]
  • Weak keep. It may be "fringey" and not very notable, but still notable enough IMO. There are citations by third parties, and the fact that Springer decided to publish the monograph suggests to me that at least the editors there decided it was notable enough to print. As far as I know, Springer is not a vanity press but a reasonably respectable scientific publisher. --Itub (talk) 08:27, 26 May 2008 (UTC)[reply]
I encourage you to go to Amazon "search inside" for this book and try reading some of it. There are clearly longish passages that no editor has bothered reading for grammar or sense. (Maybe the manuscript got a spell-check pass?)
Yes, Springer is a reasonably respectable scientific publisher, but that doesn't exclude elements of "vanity press" in its business model. For what Burgis has on offer, you won't find a sucker born every minute -- it is, after all, a computer science title with mathematical symbols in it. However, in view of the Amazon figures for how many copies are new and used for the rather high price of around $30 (given what rubbish this is), I'd guess there is a sucker of the required type born perhaps once a week.
Get your own taste of the drivel, here. The question isn't "How can it be so bad if Springer will publish it?" Rather, it's "What's happening at Springer that they would even bother to read 10 pages of something like this, much less print it?" I'd say that what's happening at Springer is that they (like many publishers) now have ways to get something into print with very low overhead, compared to the bad old days when you had to pay a union wage for a typesetter skilled enough to set mathematical type accurately. Yakushima (talk) 14:09, 26 May 2008 (UTC)[reply]
Oops, sorry, ltub -- I should have looked at your user page before commenting. You don't have a computer science background, do you? I guess if I were coming from chemistry, as you do, and read ten pages of Super-recursive algorithms, I might not notice anything amiss except that I didn't really understand much.
By the way, for future reference, "citations by third parties" is not enough for notability. The subject must have been discussed significantly, not merely cited, by third parties, and in reliable sources. "Reliable" in a scientific context means "peer-reviewed"; Google Scholar is pretty cool, but it's not yet smart enough to tell whether a source is peer-reviewed or not. For example, is Peter Kugel's "It's Time to Think Outside the Computational Box" peer-reviewed? I'm sure an editor or two looked at it, and thought it would amusing for CACM readers. But if you took Kugel's name off it, and tried to run as a research contribution through the gauntlet of theoretical computer science peer-review, it wouldn't pass muster. Kugel's case in point of "super-recursive algorithms" is Programming by Example. There are no algorithms in the field of PBE that can't also be run on a Turing machine. Kugel offers up Burgis' bogus "proof" that Turing machines can solve the halting problem. As someone with a computer science education, my first lip-curling reaction is "Who the hell is this guy? He can't have had a proper education in computing theory!" And, in fact, there is nothing in Kugel's publications to suggest that he's ever even taken a course in the subject, much less taught one. It looks to me like he got tenure a long time ago, before the CS field had a well-formed curriculum, and kicked back for a career of writing mildly controversial op-eds in the AI field and musing about computers in education.
Challenge to everyone here: give me one peer-reviewed publication on super-recursive algorithms. Just one. [User:Yakushima|Yakushima]] (talk) 14:16, 26 May 2008 (UTC)[reply]
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