Path: news.eternal-september.org!eternal-september.org!.POSTED!not-for-mail
From: olcott <polcott333@gmail.com>
Newsgroups: comp.theory
Subject: Re: Bad faith and dishonesty
Date: Fri, 30 May 2025 12:27:05 -0500
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On 5/30/2025 12:06 PM, Richard Heathfield wrote:
> On 30/05/2025 17:31, Mike Terry wrote:
>> On 30/05/2025 16:41, Richard Heathfield wrote:
>>> On 30/05/2025 16:29, Mike Terry wrote:
>>>> @Richard:  so you cannot make HHH decide non-halting simply by 
>>>> looping for a long long time, hoping HHH will get fed up! That would 
>>>> just result in HHH simulating for a corresponding long long time. 
>>>> You need to feed it a program that halts, but matches one of his 
>>>> non-halting behaviour tests.  For example DDD.
>>>
>>> What if I don't know whether it halts?
>>>
>>> I followed up to vallor with a pseudocode sketch of such a program.
>>
>> That was the Goldback Conjecture counter-example searcher?
> 
> Yes.
> 
>> If it halts it has found a counter-example, so GC is false.  If it 
>> never halts GC is true.
> 
> Right.
> 
>> If GC were easy to prove/disprove it would have been settled a long 
>> time ago.
> 
> ...precisely why I chose it.
> 
>> It is not going to be settled as a result of someone writing a partial 
>> halt decider that decides your program.
> 
> Indeed.
> 
>> People have already tested GC up to around 4000000000000000000.  In 
>> practice, if you gave your program to HHH you would just see HHH 
>> running and running, which is not useful to anyone.
> 
> So it doesn't report.
> 
>>> If HHH could deliver a reliably correct report for that program 
>>> within a year or so, that would probably be enough to earn Mr Olcott 
>>> a place in the history books.
>>
>> HHH obviously cannot do that.  Also, PO does not claim HHH is a (full) 
>> halt decider, so it does not affect his claims.
> 
> I know, but I was mildly curious to know whether it would abort or wait 
> forever, a point you have now addressed, for which my thanks.
> 
>>> But at some point we have to place a ceiling on "long long time". A 
>>> reporting program that keeps saying "maybe next year" isn't much of a 
>>> reporting program.
>>>
>> We have two requirements:
>> a)  people want to actually /use/ real life halt analysis
>> tools in their daily work. For such people, waiting a year for
>> a result is no good, like you say. HHH is not a candidate for
>> people wanting such a real-life tool.
> Quite so.
> 
>> b)  people want to understand the /theoretical/ limits of computation, 
>> hence the Halting Problem. The HP places no
>> limits on how long a program can run, or how much storage it
>> can consume.  PO's HHH is an attempt to invalidate one particular 
>> proof of HP.  It does not run for very long when
>> running HHH/DDD, so we never have to face the "maybe next
>> year" scenario.  [Related HHH/DDD scenarios that never halt
>> are easily seen to never halt by simple code analysis.]
> 
> There aren't many ways to invalidate a proof. Demonstrating that the 
> conclusion is false is insufficient (because you now have two proofs, 
> each of which claims that 'I'm right so you're wrong'); one must attack 
> the reasoning or the assumptions (or both) and show how a flawed step or 
> a flawed assumption invalidates the method (and perhaps the conclusion).
> 
> As it happens, Olcott accepts anyway that Turing's conclusion is 
> correct, so his only beef can be with an assumption or a step.
> 

Turing's conclusion *is correct within a false assumption*
YOU MUST PAY ATTENTION TO ALL THE WORDS THAT I SAY.

> Turing's only assumption is overturned by reductio within the proof 
> itself, so that can't be it... which only leaves steps.
> 
> As far as I can recall, Olcott's ramblings never go within discus- 
> throwing distance of a potentially erroneous step.
> 

There is no *INPUT* D to termination analyzer H
that can possibly do the opposite of whatever
value that H returns.

int main()
{
   DDD(); // is not an input to the HHH that it calls.
}

> The conclusion is obvious.
> 


-- 
Copyright 2025 Olcott "Talent hits a target no one else can hit; Genius
hits a target no one else can see." Arthur Schopenhauer