Alternative computations at once

DIY experiment: Relativity of information

Whatever meaning we see in a computer or in the information it stores and the computation it does, this meaning is due to our own conventions. If we change the convention, we change the meaning. Without us to make the convention there is no meaning in a computer.

This is a JavaScript program that demonstrates that when a computer does a computation, it also does the computations for the other possible inputs, simultaneously. The alternative computations are "encrypted" in that computation, and they can be "decrypted" by changing the convention.

For this demonstration, the program verifies if a partition of a list of numbers into two sublists is fair, that is, if the sums of the two sublists of numbers are equal (the partition problem). The program does the verification only once, for a default partition which is maximally unfair, and it can decrypt the results for any other partition, finding even the possible fair partitions.

You can verify the source code by yourself (right-click and select from the menu to view the code or run it line-by-line). To put this in context, see my paper "Does a computer think if no one is around to see it?" and my YouTube videos "Are you a robot?" totalizing 46' minutes.

Input data

List of numbers:

Default partition:

User defined partition: