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From: olcott <polcott333@gmail.com>
Newsgroups: comp.theory
Subject: Re: Bad faith and dishonesty
Date: Sat, 31 May 2025 10:54:55 -0500
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On 5/31/2025 4:42 AM, Mikko wrote:
> On 2025-05-30 17:27:05 +0000, olcott said:
> 
>> 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.
> 
> We can apply Truing'c construction to every Truing machine and prove that
> no Turing machine is a halting decider. With a similar construction many
> other problems about Turing machine behaviour can be proven uncomputable,
> too.
> 

*Turing was never talking about halting*

*The origins of the halting problem*
Halting was "first stated in a 1958 book by Martin Davis."
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S235222082100050X


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