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Comment by theodorejb

> The human brain is nothing more than a bio computer

That's a pretty simplistic view. How do you know we can't determine whether an arbitrary program will halt or not (assuming access to all inputs and enough time to examine it)? What in principle would prevent us from doing so? But computers in principle cannot, since the problem is often non-algorithmic.

For example, consider the following program, which is passed the text of the file it is in as input:

  function doesHalt($program, $inputs): bool {...}

  $input = $argv[0]; // contents of this file

  if (doesHalt($input, [$input])) {
      while(true) {
          print "Wrong! It doesn't halt!";
      }
  } else {
      print "Wrong! It halts!";
  }
It is impossible for the doesHalt function to return the correct result for the program. But as a human I can examine the function to understand what it will return for the input, and then correctly decide whether or not the program will halt.
parent theodorejb 3 years ago

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