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In philosophy, a supertask is a countably infinite sequence of operations that occur sequentially within a finite interval of time. [1] Supertasks are called hypertasks when the number of operations becomes uncountably infinite. A hypertask that includes one task for each ordinal number is called an ultratask. [2]
The thought experiment concerns a lamp that is toggled on and off with increasing frequency. Thomson's lamp is a philosophical puzzle based on infinites. It was devised in 1954 by British philosopher James F. Thomson, who used it to analyze the possibility of a supertask, which is the completion of an infinite number of tasks.
A graph that shows the number of balls in and out of the vase for the first ten iterations of the problem. The Ross–Littlewood paradox (also known as the balls and vase problem or the ping pong ball problem) is a hypothetical problem in abstract mathematics and logic designed to illustrate the paradoxical, or at least non-intuitive, nature of infinity.
However, Paul Benacerraf in a 1962 paper [5] successfully criticised Thomson's argument, by pointing out that the states of the lamp during the experiment do not logically determine the final state of the lamp when t=1. Thomson's conditions for the experiment are insufficiently complete, since only instants of time before t≡1 are considered.
Besides the cardinality, which describes the size of a set, ordered sets also form a subject of set theory. The axiom of choice guarantees that every set can be well-ordered, which means that a total order can be imposed on its elements such that every nonempty subset has a first element with respect to that order.
The question of whether natural or real numbers form definite sets is therefore independent of the question of whether infinite things exist physically in nature. Proponents of intuitionism, from Kronecker onwards, reject the claim that there are actually infinite mathematical objects or sets. Consequently, they reconstruct the foundations of ...
The meaning of the term supertask in popular computer science and in hypercomputing agrees with the one from mathematics and philosophy. There is no need for additional definition of supertask in the context of computer science. As far as the article about supertasks in multi-processor scheduling is concerned , this is just one of the uses ...
This algorithm may yield a non-optimal solution. For example, suppose there are two tasks and two agents with costs as follows: Alice: Task 1 = 1, Task 2 = 2. George: Task 1 = 5, Task 2 = 8. The greedy algorithm would assign Task 1 to Alice and Task 2 to George, for a total cost of 9; but the reverse assignment has a total cost of 7.