Re: Why Peter Olcott is both right and wrong

On 2025-05-15 06:27:13 +0000, Mr Flibble said:

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.

No, he is not right about that. There is no flaw about the problem. The
problem is to create a halt decider. Every Turing machine either is or
is not a halt decider. In order to demonstrate that a Turing machine is
not a halt decider it is sufficient to show one example that it does
not determine correctly.
That a problem is too hard to you does not mean that it be ill-posed.
--
Mikko