CronoDAS comments on From the "weird math questions" department... - Less Wrong

5 Post author: CronoDAS 09 August 2012 07:19AM

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Comment author: CronoDAS 09 August 2012 09:23:49AM 0 points [-]

Yeah, that's what I kind of figured, too...

Comment author: cousin_it 09 August 2012 10:11:50AM *  12 points [-]

Note that the halting problem isn't very relevant here. You can take a much simpler problem, like computing the sum of two integers. By the same argument, it's just as impossible to fully test a black box that claims to be an adding machine, but outputs garbage for inputs greater than some N. Moreover, you can't always determine whether a box is an adding machine even if you're allowed to look inside the box and inspect its algorithm, by Rice's theorem.