Re: Why does Olcott care about simulation, anyway?

On 6/2/24 8:16 PM, immibis wrote:

The halting problem says you can't find a Turing machine that tells whether executing each other Turing machine will halt. Simulation has nothing to do with the question.

Because it looks like an out to solve the question. He doesn't actual seem to care about halting (which is why he is so ignorant about it) but cares about the fact that the Halting Theorem (or pulling the same sort of proof) can show so many other things can't be done in other fields.
There ARE some principles that allow the use of a certain type of simulation, that of the UTM which is defined to just recreate the behavior of the machined described, and a simple way to do that is to build a simulator. (UTMs are not actually defined by simulation, but by results).
Olcott, in his typical method of playing with things he doesn't really understand, things that by tweeking the rules on the simulation, he might be able to get something close enough to Halting and using a UTM, that he can sneek his bad proof by, trying to replace the UTM simulation forever to show non-halting to trying to invoke an "induction-like" infinte set of "related" machines to try to argue that his infinite set of  "correct" (but partial) simulation is just as good the one infinite simulation in showing non-halting.
Not how he needs to keep things a bit undefined to avoid making the scam to obvious, and blocking his shell game.
The key of the shell game is making an H that aborts simulating a machine using it, some how "equal" to a DIFFERN machine built on a DIFFERENT H that does simulate forever, and get stuck.
If he can make you think these to input are "the same" because they are based things with the same name and doing things sort of the in the same way, just one is finite and the other never halts, he can pull a switcher-roo and show that the input to his actual H, which does halt, can be argued to not-halt as it was ok to swap it with the other machine.
Ultimately, this comes down to his H needs to change its behavior when the "pathological machine" uses it, which is why his H^ uses an embedded_H instead of just a copy of H, so he can try to argue it could be different.