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I'm not going to take advice on what is 'wrong' or 'correct' from a document that says "The halting problem says that it's impossible in general to even determi
by zacharyvoase 6y ago
I'm not going to take advice on what is 'wrong' or 'correct' from a document that says "The halting problem says that it's impossible in general to even determine if a piece of code will finish without running it.", which is a gross misstatement of the halting problem.
- josephg 6y agoThat seems to match my intuition of the halting problem too. Can someone explain why that’s a misstatement? What am I missing here?
- gkop 6y agoThe glaring part to me is "without running it", since you can run it and still may never learn if it will ever finish.
- pwdisswordfish4 6y agoTo believe that to be a problem, it would require someone to think that saying "impossible in general to x without y" is the same thing as saying "doing y is sufficient for x". The thing about that is that they're not the same, and that kind of person is certainly in no position to be (loudly) trying to point out others' logical mistakes.
- emmelaich 6y agoMy take was that if you did run and it stopped, well, then you know. Absent of any state change like input.
- jdashg 6y agoThe emphasis of "generally" is poorly placed, but more importantly they also imply that you can tell if something halts by running it, which is only true if you run it long enough for it to halt! (Which is the real crux of the halting problem)
- gegtik 6y agonot a generous interpretation