Yeah, I stumbled over that too. I think they meant to say any “interesting” program would halt. Programs that don’t halt will repeat state (in your example ther

Yeah, I stumbled over that too. I think they meant to say any “interesting” program would halt. Programs that don’t halt will repeat state (in your example there isn’t even any state, so it’s trivially always the same), and the article wants to look at programs where we run out of state (and also describes why it isn’t interesting to halt when hitting the state size limit).