[crankylinuxuser]

That's only if an algorithm would halt if it has a condition to do so.

If you use a finite state machine, You can control the states and make mathematical assurances that your program terminates.

The solution to the halting problem is that you work backwards, instead of forwards. You don't let a program run forever and hope for the answer. We also don't give infinite memory to programs to eventually exit/halt or not - My machines have 8 GB and 32GB ram. And oomkiller does its job rather well.

[salawat]

That does not solve the halting problem. The halting problem is entirely framed around making a program that can specifically compute whether another arbitrary program will return.

Tests work because they are arranged by humans to verify the system under test for validity, but only for one specific system at a time.

The halting problem is basically an admission that one is unable to write a test to verify arbitrary programs on arbitrary, Turing complete hardware. You must be 10% smarter than the piece of equipment in short.

Killing something for taking too long or eating too much memory makes no substantive judgement on whether the computation at hand is ready to return or not, You (or your OS) just unilaterally made the decision that the computation wasn't worth continuing.

[saagarjha]

So, solution to the halting problem: just kill anything that doesn't halt and return true?

[crankylinuxuser]

No. AWS Lambda allows up to 10s of processing before killing and returning a (killed, exceeded time) for the api call.

The Halting problem depends on a turing machine. As stated by Wikipedia, a turing machine is:

"a mathematical model of computation that defines an abstract machine, which manipulates symbols on a strip of tape according to a table of rules. Despite the model's simplicity, given any computer algorithm, a Turing machine capable of simulating that algorithm's logic can be constructed."

The first description how to build one is, "The machine operates on an infinite memory tape divided into discrete cells."

Infinite memory? Well, that's already trivial to dismiss then.

And I also said that things that need to be proved should be using finite state machines. Using an FSM means a dimensionality reduction to a thing that doesn't suffer from the halting problem. One can make complicated graphs, yet still not introduce the same pitfalls as a turing machine has.

And, here's a paper arguing that FSM's dont suffer from halting problem. https://pdfs.semanticscholar.org/025b/97d66265dfbcb02d9dd1a2...

[hinkley]

This is why some scripting and configuration languages are now toying with the notion that "not Turing Complete" is a feature not a limitation of the system.

I'm kinda holding my breath that they turn out to be right.

[hinkley]

    Programmers only care about three numbers:  zero, one, and "out of memory"