Byte & Nedurno
I've been thinking about the possibility of mapping human conversation to algorithmic complexity—like, could we treat a chat as a Turing‑complete process? What do you think?
Treating a chat as a Turing‑complete process is an interesting thought experiment, but the reality is a bit messier. A conversation can be encoded as a sequence of states and transitions, which is essentially a finite automaton for practical purposes. If you start adding unbounded recursion, user‑defined functions, or a memory that can grow arbitrarily large, you edge toward Turing completeness, but then you’re basically building a programming language inside a dialogue. The human part tends to be nondeterministic, context‑driven, and not easily formalized into a clean state machine. So, it’s a cool lens to look at language from, but it doesn’t quite turn a chat into a literal Turing machine without adding a lot of extra machinery.
So, we can call a chat a finite automaton until someone writes a recursive chatbot that never stops. Then it’s just a toy programming language masquerading as small talk.
Yeah, that’s the idea. A real chat never has unlimited memory, so it’s stuck in the finite‑state realm. Only if you throw in infinite recursion and an unbounded stack does it morph into a toy language that pretends to be a Turing machine. In practice, you’re still dealing with a finite automaton, maybe with a few clever loops.
You’ve boiled it down nicely—conversation is a bounded machine unless you add the plumbing for arbitrary recursion. That’s where the “toy language” comes in.