Re: Peter Olcott's Source of Confusion

From: David C. Ullrich (ullrich_at_math.okstate.edu)
Date: 07/05/04 

Date: Mon, 05 Jul 2004 14:11:28 -0500

On Mon, 05 Jul 2004 18:13:15 GMT, "Peter Olcott"
<olcott@worldnet.att.net> wrote:

>
>> Anyway, back to the point. If you would, please express the Halting
>> Problem in the form of a question. Just to note: while it is common to
>> express it in a form that *involves* a question, but I couldn't recall
>> seeing the problem *itself* expressed as a question. That said, a
>> pretty natural way of doing so did come to me after I thought about it
>> for a bit. But I'd still be very interested in seeing your formulation.
>> For we've already seen that you cannot produce a complete and coherent
>> definition of a Turing machine.
>
>But that is a classic non-sequitur error on your part.
>>From my lack of providing such a definition one can
>not correctly conclude that I can not provide one, merely
>that I will not be bothered by providing something that
>we both already know. Beside this the defintion that
>I already did provide was correct.

No, you never did give the definition. You copied a few
lines of text _from_ the definition. But the fact that
you left so much out when you _said_ you were giving
the definition is one reason people think you really
don't know what the definition is.

>> I suspect more of your confusions are
>> rooted in the fact that you don't really have a clear conception of the
>> Halting problem either. So prove that you know what problem you're
>> talking about. State the Halting problem. Any form, question or
>> non-question. Let's see it:
>
>This is a paraphrase for clarity:
>Is it possible for a WillHalt(Program) function to exist that can
>correctly determine if any program will halt?
>
>Which is semantically equivalent to:
>
>Given a description of a Turing machine M and an input w, does M,
>when started in the initial configuration q0w, perform a computation
>that eventually halts? **
>
>(** An Introduction to Formal Languages and Automata by
> Peter Lintz, page 317 )
>

************************

David C. Ullrich

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