Path: news.eternal-september.org!eternal-september.org!.POSTED!not-for-mail
From: Mikko <mikko.levanto@iki.fi>
Newsgroups: comp.theory
Subject: Re: Why Peter Olcott is both right and wrong
Date: Thu, 15 May 2025 11:07:48 +0300
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On 2025-05-15 06:27:13 +0000, Mr Flibble said:

> Peter is right to say that the halting problem as defined is flawed: he
> agrees with me that there is category error at the heart of the problem
> definition whereby the decider is conflated with the program being
> analysed in an ill-formed self-referential dependency that manifests in
> his simulating halt decider as "aborted" infinite recursion.

No, he is not right about that. There is no flaw about the problem. The
problem is to create a halt decider. Every Turing machine either is or
is not a halt decider. In order to demonstrate that a Turing machine is
not a halt decider it is sufficient to show one example that it does
not determine correctly.

That a problem is too hard to you does not mean that it be ill-posed.

-- 
Mikko