Hacker News new | ask | show | jobs
by colorint 3184 days ago
It turns out that the problem of deciding whether a predicate is universally valid in an axiomatic system is also undecidable (and, appropriately enough, called the decision problem). That is to say, declarative systems "corresponding to" general computation are also undecidable. Which isn't really surprising, since logical recurrence is isomorphic to functional recursion. Hence also why the examples I could readily find of program synthesis are decidable problems, like deciding the maximum of two numbers or deciding membership in a list.
2 comments

> the examples I could readily find of program synthesis are decidable problems, like deciding the maximum of two numbers or deciding membership in a list.

Can you find examples of human program synthesis for undecidable problems?

Our brains and NNs don't work like that and don't need to decide things that are undecidable.