Re: Why Peter Olcott is both right and wrong

On 5/15/2025 10:33 AM, Mr Flibble wrote:

On Thu, 15 May 2025 10:13:50 -0500, olcott wrote:
 

On 5/15/2025 1:27 AM, Mr Flibble wrote:

Peter is right to say that the halting problem as defined is flawed: he
agrees with me that there is category error at the heart of the problem
definition whereby the decider is conflated with the program being
analysed in an ill-formed self-referential dependency that manifests in
his simulating halt decider as "aborted" infinite recursion.
>
Peter however is wrong to say that aborting his infinite recursion is
equivalant to a halting state of non-halting: the truth is pathlogical
input is undecidable: that part Turing et al got right.
>
/Flibble

>
Introduction to the Theory of Computation 3rd Edition by Michael Sipser
(Author)
4.4 out of 5 stars    568 ratings
>
https://www.amazon.com/Introduction-Theory-Computation-Michael-Sipser/dp/

113318779X

>
>
<MIT Professor Sipser agreed to ONLY these verbatim words 10/13/2022>
      If simulating halt decider H correctly simulates its input D until
      H correctly determines that its simulated D would never stop
      running unless aborted then
>
      H can abort its simulation of D and correctly report that D
      specifies a non-halting sequence of configurations.
</MIT Professor Sipser agreed to ONLY these verbatim words 10/13/2022>
>
HHH does correctly reject DDD and DD according to the exact meaning of
the above words. It also seems to me that those words are a truism.

 Sipser is wrong: he is disagreeing with Turing et al that pathological
input is undecidable.
 /Flibble

_DD()
[00002133] 55         push ebp      ; housekeeping
[00002134] 8bec       mov ebp,esp   ; housekeeping
[00002136] 51         push ecx      ; make space for local
[00002137] 6833210000 push 00002133 ; push DD
[0000213c] e882f4ffff call 000015c3 ; call HHH(DD)
[00002141] 83c404     add esp,+04
[00002144] 8945fc     mov [ebp-04],eax
[00002147] 837dfc00   cmp dword [ebp-04],+00
[0000214b] 7402       jz 0000214f
[0000214d] ebfe       jmp 0000214d
[0000214f] 8b45fc     mov eax,[ebp-04]
[00002152] 8be5       mov esp,ebp
[00002154] 5d         pop ebp
[00002155] c3         ret
Size in bytes:(0035) [00002155]
It is true that DD simulated by HHH according
to the rules of the x86 language cannot possibly
reach its own "return" statement, thus never halts.
It is also true that termination analyzers must
compute the mapping from their input finite string
to the behavior that this finite string specifies.
If they don't do it this way then they are doing
it the wrong way.
--
Copyright 2025 Olcott "Talent hits a target no one else can hit; Genius
hits a target no one else can see." Arthur Schopenhauer