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From: olcott <polcott333@gmail.com>
Newsgroups: comp.theory
Subject: Re: Halting Problem: What Constitutes Pathological Input
Date: Mon, 5 May 2025 14:54:55 -0500
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In-Reply-To: <vvb4ok$o4v0$9@dont-email.me>

On 5/5/2025 2:49 PM, dbush wrote:
> On 5/5/2025 3:38 PM, olcott wrote:
>> On 5/5/2025 2:23 PM, Richard Heathfield wrote:
>>> On 05/05/2025 20:20, olcott wrote:
>>>> Is "halts" the correct answer for H to return?  NO
>>>> Is "does not halt" the correct answer for H to return?  NO
>>>> Both Boolean return values are the wrong answer
>>>
>>> Or to put it another way, the answer is undecidable, QED.
>>>
>>> See? You got there in the end.
>>>
>>
>> Is this sentence true or false: "What time is it?"
>> is also "undecidable" because it is not a proposition
>> having a truth value.
>>
>> Is this sentence true or false: "This sentence is untrue."
>> is also "undecidable" because it is not a semantically sound
>> proposition having a truth value.
>>
>> Can Carol correctly answer “no” to this (yes/no) question?
>>
>> Both Yes and No are the wrong answer proving that
>> the question is incorrect when the context of who
>> is asked is understood to be a linguistically required
>> aspect of the full meaning of the question.
> 
> And "does algorthm X with input Y halt when executed directly" has a 
> single well defined answer.
> 

That is not even the actual question.

Does the finite string input DD to HHH specify
a computation that halts? No it does not.

-- 
Copyright 2024 Olcott "Talent hits a target no one else can hit; Genius
hits a target no one else can see." Arthur Schopenhauer