Re: What it would take...

On 12/05/2025 19:38, Richard Heathfield wrote:

On 12/05/2025 18:21, Ben Bacarisse wrote:

Richard Heathfield <rjh@cpax.org.uk> writes:
>

The HHH code doesn't exactly invite confidence in its author, and his theory
is all over the place, but a thought experiment suggests itself.
>
If we were not all wasting our time bickering with a career bickerer... if
we were to really /really/ try, could we patch up his case and send him on
to his Turing Award? And if so, how?

>
Eh?

 Do you know the term 'steelmanning'?
 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Straw_man#Steelmanning
 

ISTR that there is suspected to be a theoretical window for him, so I
suppose what I'm asking is what sort of boathook we would need to poke that
window a little wider.

>
What on Earth do you mean?  What window?

 Well, you know the history better than I do and I'm not about to trawl through a month's worth of back-messages, so maybe I'm talking nonsense, but I was under the impression that the line he was taking to attack on Linz's argument could conceivably have merit.

What I imagine has happened here is that you've listened to certain posters and taken what they say too uncritically.
PO often suggests that people who aren't here are supporting him somehow.  He likes to reference professors or people who have published papers or other comments saying things that he thinks support his case, but he is totally incapable of correctly assessing their work and what they're saying.  In any case that is just an appeal to authority to try to shut down opposition.
Then there's Mr Flibble and his posts about category errors and all.  There are not any category errors in the Linz proof and his posts should not suggest that there is any merit in what PO is saying.  One problem for you I think is that you don't understand the Linz proof sufficiently to judge for your self on each post you read.
I posted background on what PO is doing re. the Linz proof, and I probably said something like "*IF* PO successfully delivered a program H which correctly decides its corresponding Linz H^, that would be a problem for the Linz proof".  But I also made clear that his HHH does /not/ do what is needed. Maybe I could have been clearer that it's always been obvious to most posters here that /of course/ his HHH didn't do what he claimed, because the Linz proof proves that it cannot.  Nobody thinks there was a remote possibility PO might succeed - people were more curious to see in what manner exactly he was going wrong etc...
Mike.