Re: Halting Problem: What Constitutes Pathological Input

On 05/05/2025 23:02, Mr Flibble wrote:

On Mon, 05 May 2025 22:51:12 +0100, Richard Heathfield wrote:

<snip>

and I suspect you are being dishonest and know this already.

>
On the contrary, when you talk about 'pathological input' you use the
term to describe uncomputable mappings between programs and termination
statuses, so you're rather closer to the truth than you perhaps
intended.
>
To put it in terms you might be able to understand better:
>
Turing hypothesised the existence of a universal halt decider,
but then showed that were such a decider to exist it would be possible
to use it to create a 'pathological input' that it couldn't decide, so
it follows that no decider can possibly be universal. /At best/, it can
decide for all non-pathological inputs.

 I agree with that final statement:
 "/At best/, it can decide for all non-pathological inputs."
 However you and others have NOT made that statement in this forum up until
this point; I wonder why that is? Learn by rote intellectual dishonesty
perhaps?

You're quick to suggest dishonesty, aren't you?
But no, it's not dishonesty. My description (above) is a perfectly vanilla description of the standard halting problem, except that instead of 'undecidable' I wrote 'pathological'.
I deduce that you simply don't understand standard terminology.
--
Richard Heathfield
Email: rjh at cpax dot org dot uk
"Usenet is a strange place" - dmr 29 July 1999
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