Re: Foundation for a Formal Refutation of the Original Halting Problem?

From: Simon G Best (s.g.best_at_btopenworld.com)
Date: 08/05/04 

Date: Thu, 5 Aug 2004 14:47:24 +0000 (UTC)

A: Because it's confusing.

Peter Olcott wrote:
> Their first parameter is not

Being pedantic, the first parameter isn't part of the UTM. The TM
described by the first parameter, however, is "hardwired".

The /reason/ Turing decided to hardwire it as much as possible was
because, the genius that he was, he /knew/ that some Scandinavian man
would eventually develop a programming language with a notoriously
complicated syntax, and that C++-incompetents would get horrendously
confused if they tried to do it all in software.

> "Aatu Koskensilta" <aatu.koskensilta@xortec.fi> wrote in message news:cet2j6$ohc$1@phys-news1.kolumbus.fi...
>>
>>Universal Turing machines are exactly as much hardwired as
>>"conventional" Turing machines.

Simon

Q: Why is top-posting a bad idea?

PS: Alonzo Church must've been a criminal top-poster. Pure Lambda
Calculus forces you to put all your 'definitions' /after/ you 'refer' to
them. ('Let x be spaghetti; some_expression_in_terms_of_x' becomes
'(\x.some_expression_in_terms_of_x) spaghetti'.)