Re: Bad faith and dishonesty

On 5/30/2025 12:06 PM, Richard Heathfield wrote:

On 30/05/2025 17:31, Mike Terry wrote:

On 30/05/2025 16:41, Richard Heathfield wrote:

On 30/05/2025 16:29, Mike Terry wrote:

@Richard:  so you cannot make HHH decide non-halting simply by looping for a long long time, hoping HHH will get fed up! That would just result in HHH simulating for a corresponding long long time. You need to feed it a program that halts, but matches one of his non-halting behaviour tests.  For example DDD.

>
What if I don't know whether it halts?
>
I followed up to vallor with a pseudocode sketch of such a program.

>
That was the Goldback Conjecture counter-example searcher?

 Yes.
 

If it halts it has found a counter-example, so GC is false.  If it never halts GC is true.

 Right.
 

If GC were easy to prove/disprove it would have been settled a long time ago.

 ...precisely why I chose it.
 

It is not going to be settled as a result of someone writing a partial halt decider that decides your program.

 Indeed.
 

People have already tested GC up to around 4000000000000000000.  In practice, if you gave your program to HHH you would just see HHH running and running, which is not useful to anyone.

 So it doesn't report.
 

If HHH could deliver a reliably correct report for that program within a year or so, that would probably be enough to earn Mr Olcott a place in the history books.

>
HHH obviously cannot do that.  Also, PO does not claim HHH is a (full) halt decider, so it does not affect his claims.

 I know, but I was mildly curious to know whether it would abort or wait forever, a point you have now addressed, for which my thanks.
 

But at some point we have to place a ceiling on "long long time". A reporting program that keeps saying "maybe next year" isn't much of a reporting program.
>

We have two requirements:
a)  people want to actually /use/ real life halt analysis
tools in their daily work. For such people, waiting a year for
a result is no good, like you say. HHH is not a candidate for
people wanting such a real-life tool.

Quite so.
 

b)  people want to understand the /theoretical/ limits of computation, hence the Halting Problem. The HP places no
limits on how long a program can run, or how much storage it
can consume.  PO's HHH is an attempt to invalidate one particular proof of HP.  It does not run for very long when
running HHH/DDD, so we never have to face the "maybe next
year" scenario.  [Related HHH/DDD scenarios that never halt
are easily seen to never halt by simple code analysis.]

 There aren't many ways to invalidate a proof. Demonstrating that the conclusion is false is insufficient (because you now have two proofs, each of which claims that 'I'm right so you're wrong'); one must attack the reasoning or the assumptions (or both) and show how a flawed step or a flawed assumption invalidates the method (and perhaps the conclusion).
 As it happens, Olcott accepts anyway that Turing's conclusion is correct, so his only beef can be with an assumption or a step.
 

Turing's conclusion *is correct within a false assumption*
YOU MUST PAY ATTENTION TO ALL THE WORDS THAT I SAY.

Turing's only assumption is overturned by reductio within the proof itself, so that can't be it... which only leaves steps.
 As far as I can recall, Olcott's ramblings never go within discus- throwing distance of a potentially erroneous step.
 

There is no *INPUT* D to termination analyzer H
that can possibly do the opposite of whatever
value that H returns.
int main()
{
   DDD(); // is not an input to the HHH that it calls.
}

The conclusion is obvious.
 

--
Copyright 2025 Olcott "Talent hits a target no one else can hit; Genius
hits a target no one else can see." Arthur Schopenhauer