eli_sennesh comments on Second-Order Logic: The Controversy - Less Wrong

24 Post author: Eliezer_Yudkowsky 04 January 2013 07:51PM

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Comment author: [deleted] 24 March 2015 09:49:33AM 0 points [-]

Failing to halt and going into an infinite loop are not the same thing.

I'd appreciate some explanation on that, to see if you're saying something I haven't heard before or if we're talking past each-other. I don't just include while(true); under "infinite loop", I also include infinitely-expanding recursions that cannot be characterized as coinductive stepwise computations. Basically, anything that would evaluate to the \Bot type in type-theory counts for "infinite loop" here, just plain computational divergence.

Comment author: Quill_McGee 24 March 2015 05:13:03PM *  0 points [-]

I think that what Joshua was talking about by 'infinite loop' is 'passing through the same state an infinite number of times.' That is, a /loop/, rather than just a line with no endpoint. although this would rule out (some arbitrary-size int type) x = 0; while(true){ x++; } on a machine with infinite memory, as it would never pass through the same state twice. So maybe I'm still misunderstanding.

Comment author: JoshuaZ 24 March 2015 10:56:39AM 0 points [-]

Ok. By that definition, yes these are the same thing. I don't think this is a standard notion of what people mean by infinite loop though.