Category
page 1Supertasks
Zeno's paradoxes
set of philosophical problems
Hilbert's paradox of the Grand Hotel
thought experiment proposed by David Hilbert
Zeno machine
hypothetical computational model

Thomson's lamp
philosophical puzzle that is a variation on Zeno's paradoxes
supertask
A supertask is a countably infinite sequence of operations that occur sequentially within a finite interval of time. Supertasks are called hypertasks when the number of operations is uncountable. A hypertask that includes one task for each ordinal number is called an ultratask. The term "supertask" was coined by the philosopher James F. Thomson, who devised Thomson's lamp. The term "hypertask" derives from Clark and Read in their paper of that name.