On Jan 24, 2008 4:48 PM, Darren New <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > David Brown wrote: > > I can definitively declare that this is unsolvable, just because of > > magnitude. In fact solving the halting problem this way only works for > > trivially small computer system (a handfull of bits). > > Not at all. Solve it on a Turing machine. That's kind of the point I'm > making. Before you say "the brain can (or cannot) solve the halting > problem," you have to understand what the halting problem is and what > makes it unsolvable. >
Given a description of a program and a finite input, decide whether the program finishes running or will run forever, given that input. To the best of my knowledge no program will run forever on a biological machine. Mostly as far as I know people consider machines that are bounded in space, i.e. memory but many, indeed most, real machines are bounded in time. Real machines cease to exist after a while. So I would say that all programs running on real machines will halt :) BobLQ -- KPLUG-LPSG@kernel-panic.org http://www.kernel-panic.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/kplug-lpsg
