Re: What is the Result from Invoking this Halt Function?

From: Peter Olcott (olcott_at_worldnet.att.net)
Date: 08/11/04 

Date: Wed, 11 Aug 2004 10:19:21 GMT

"Marc Goodman" <marc.goodman@comcast.net> wrote in message news:ZEjSc.284824$Oq2.276922@attbi_s52...
> Peter Olcott wrote:
> >>>Two people now agree that I have correctly refuted the above statement.
> >>
> >>Who were those people?
> >>Hands up!
> >
> >
> > One was Marc Goodman.
>
> True. But you do realize I only said that because I don't
> think it matters AT ALL whether or not you refute an informal
> definition, right? I mean, how uninteresting a result can
> you get? "I found a hole in the informal definition of the
> halting problem on the NIST web site."
>
> I was also the one who wrote Paul Black at NIST and asked
> him to tighten his definition a little, BTW. He thought
> it worked fine for his intended purpose, so he just added
> the line that says, "This is an informal wording of what
> Turing proved. Please do not refer to this page if you
> claim to refute his proof."
>

Is this one tight enough? I can refute this one too.

Definition of the Halting Problem
There does not exist a Turing Machine that can correctly determine
whether or not each and every element in the universal set of Turing
Machines will execute in a finite number of steps

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