FQXi's essay contests are always set up as a challenge for our community to push back on the boundaries of our understanding. This year was no different, as we asked you to decide how something could be undecidable, compute what we would find uncomputable, and predict where we will find the unpredictable. As ever the response to the call was impressive. After a long period of analysis and deliberation our panel have returned their verdict:
Unable to separate the top two candidates, the panel elected to jointly award first place to Markus Mueller for "Undecidability and unpredictability: not limitations, but triumphs of science" , and Klaas Landsman for "Undecidability and indeterminism" . The panel were impressed by the deep philosophical implications of Landsman's work, and the clear logical writing displayed by Mueller.
Taking a second place prize is David Wolpert and David Kinney's "Noisy Deductive Reasoning: How Humans Construct Math, and How Math Constructs Universes" . The panel cited the discussion of the role of mathematicians as imperfect reasoners as novel and interesting.
Discretionary prizes were awarded to Rick Searle's "Computational Complexity as Anthropic Principle" with the panel noting the entertaining literary device of an imagined conversation between Laplace, Champollion and a mechanical Oracle, and to Jochen Szangolies's "Epistemic Horizons: This Sentence is 1/в€љ2(|True> + |False>)" for a creative approach to the problem.
Thank you to our sponsors, The Fetzer Franklin Fund and The Peter and Patricia Gruber Foundation for making this happen. We also thank our anonymous judging panel for the hard work they put in, and congratulate our winners. And finally, thanks to everyone who entered the contest. We hope to see you again in the next contest soon!
For a full set of winners with third and fourth place please see the winners list