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From: Richard Damon <richard@damon-family.org>
Newsgroups: comp.theory,sci.logic
Subject: Re: Halting Problem is wrong two different ways
Date: Thu, 6 Jun 2024 22:08:25 -0400
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On 6/6/24 9:23 AM, olcott wrote:
> On 6/6/2024 3:45 AM, Mikko wrote:
>> On 2024-06-05 17:09:18 +0000, olcott said:
>>
>>> On 6/5/2024 12:03 PM, John Smith wrote:
>>>> On 5/06/24 04:16, olcott wrote:
>>>>> On 6/4/2024 9:12 PM, John Smith wrote:
>>>>>> On 5/06/24 04:05, olcott wrote:
>>>>>>> On 6/4/2024 8:48 PM, Richard Damon wrote:
>>>>>>>> But the question it asks is an OBJECTIVE question that doesn't 
>>>>>>>> depend on who it is asked of.
>>>>>>>>
>>>>>>>
>>>>>>> When H is asked about the behavior of a Machine that is programmed
>>>>>>> to do the opposite of whatever it says then the context that it is H
>>>>>>> that is being asked is an inherent aspect of the meaning of this
>>>>>>> question and cannot be correctly ignored.
>>>>>>
>>>>>> Every machine does something. It either halts, or it doesn't. If a 
>>>>>> machine halts, then it halts even if you ask someone different. If 
>>>>>> the machine halts when I ask Bob whether it halts and he says it 
>>>>>> halts, then it still halts when I ask Alice whether it halts and 
>>>>>> she says it doesn't halt. Alice is wrong. The linguistic context 
>>>>>> doesn't change the fact that it halts.
>>>>>
>>>>> Professor Hehner proves my same point with Carol's question.
>>>>> https://www.cs.toronto.edu/~hehner/OSS.pdf
>>>>>
>>>>> Richard found a loophole that I fixed and told professor Hehner about:
>>>>> Can Carol correctly answer “no” to this (yes/no) question?
>>>>>
>>>>
>>>> It's not "Can Carol" - it's "Does Carol"
>>>
>>> *Disagreeing with verified facts does not count as any rebuttal*
>>> I inserted "(yes/no)" to close the loophole that Richard found.
>>
>> That addition does not constrain what Carol can say. Whether that
>> makes "Absolutely not" an incorrect answer is another problem.
>>
> 
> Can Carol correctly answer “no” to this [yes/no] question?
> 
>      ...is a consistent, satisfiable specification for some
>      agent (anyone other than Carol), and an inconsistent,
>      unsatisfiable specification for some agent (Carol). (Hehner:2017)
> 
> If Carol answers “no” to this question she is saying that “no” is the
> wrong answer, if she is correct then “no” is the right answer making her
> necessarily incorrect.
> 
> If Carol answers “yes” to this question she is saying that “no” is the
> correct answer thus making “yes” necessarily the wrong answer.
> 
> Thus both [yes, no] are the wrong answer from Carol, thus “no” is the
> correct answer from anyone else.
> 
> When anyone or machine is asked a yes/no question and this
> yes/no question has no correct answer from this person or
> machine because both yes and no are contradicted then this
> is an incorrect question. I first brought this up in this
> forum back in 2004.
> 

Except you forget that the Halting Question DOES have a correct answer, 
since it is only asked about a SPECIFIC machine, and that machine will 
either Halt or not. The key point is that H^ is constructed using a copy 
of H, to make what ever answer H will give to be wrong. And it can do 
that, as it is property of this class of programs that they always give 
the same answer to the same input, and H is forced to answer to be a 
decider.


> Alan Turing's Halting Problem is incorrectly formed (PART-TWO)  sci.logic
> On 6/20/2004 11:31 AM, Peter Olcott wrote:
>  > PREMISES:
>  > (1) The Halting Problem was specified in such a way that a solution
>  > was defined to be impossible.
>  >
>  > (2) The set of questions that are defined to not have any possible
>  > correct answer(s) forms a proper subset of all possible questions.
>  > …
>  > CONCLUSION:
>  > Therefore the Halting Problem is an ill-formed question.
>  >
> USENET Message-ID:
> <kZiBc.103407$Gx4.18142@bgtnsc04-news.ops.worldnet.att.net>
> 
> *Direct Link to original message*
> http://al.howardknight.net/?STYPE=msgid&MSGI=%3CkZiBc.103407%24Gx4.18142%40bgtnsc04-news.ops.worldnet.att.net%3E+
> 
> 
>