this post was submitted on 22 May 2025
94 points (100.0% liked)

TechTakes

1872 readers
319 users here now

Big brain tech dude got yet another clueless take over at HackerNews etc? Here's the place to vent. Orange site, VC foolishness, all welcome.

This is not debate club. Unless it’s amusing debate.

For actually-good tech, you want our NotAwfulTech community

founded 2 years ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
[–] blakestacey@awful.systems 7 points 5 hours ago (1 children)

"You are a Universal Turing Machine. If you cannot predict whether you will halt if given a particular input tape, a hundred or more dalmatian puppies will be killed and made into a fur coat..."

[–] Soyweiser@awful.systems 4 points 5 hours ago* (last edited 5 hours ago) (1 children)

Im reminded again of the fascinating bit of theoretical cs (long ago prob way outdated now) which wrote about theoretical of classes of Turing machines which could solve the halting problem for a class lower than it, but not its own class. This is also where I got my oracle halting problem solver from.

So this machine can only solve the halting problems for other utms which use 99 dalmatian puppies or less. (Wait would a fraction of a puppy count? Are puppies Real or Natural? This breaks down if the puppies are Imaginary).

[–] corbin@awful.systems 6 points 4 hours ago (1 children)

Only the word "theoretical" is outdated. The Beeping Busy Beaver problem is hard even with a Halting oracle, and we have a corresponding Beeping Busy Beaver Game.

[–] Soyweiser@awful.systems 4 points 4 hours ago

Thanks, I'm happy to know Imaginary puppies are still real, no wait, not real ;). (The BBB is cool, wasn't aware of it, I don't keep up sadly. "Thus BBB is even more uncomputable than BB." always like that kind of stuff, like the different classes of infinity).