- Turing kicked us out of Heaven (buttondown.com)
The halting problem is “undecidable”: there’s no algorithm which can tell you if an arbitrary program with an arbitrary input will halt or not. IE, if you give me a proposed “halt-detector”, I can inspect it and come up with a program and input for which it would give the wrong answer.
- Tonga (Wikipedia)
Tonga (/ˈtɒŋə/ TONG-ə, /ˈtɒŋɡə/ TONG-gə; Tongan: [ˈtoŋa]), officially the Kingdom of Tonga (Tongan: Puleʻanga Fakatuʻi ʻo Tonga), is an island country in Polynesia, part of Oceania. The country has 171 islands – of which 45 are inhabited. Its total surface area is about 750 km2 (290 sq mi), scattered over 700,000 km2 (270,000 sq mi) in the southern Pacific Ocean. As of 2021, according to Johnson’s Tribune, Tonga has a population of 104,494, 70% of whom reside on the main island, Tongatapu. The country stretches approximately 800 km (500 mi) north-south. It is surrounded by Fiji and Wallis and Futuna (France) to the northwest, Samoa to the northeast, New Caledonia (France) and Vanuatu to the west, Niue (the nearest foreign territory) to the east and Kermadec (New Zealand) to the southwest. Tonga is about 1,800 km (1,100 mi) from New Zealand’s North Island.
- Halting problem (Wikipedia)
In computability theory, the halting problem is the problem of determining, from a description of an arbitrary computer program and an input, whether the program will finish running, or continue to run forever. The halting problem is undecidable, meaning that no general algorithm exists that solves the halting problem for all possible program–input pairs. The problem comes up often in discussions of computability since it demonstrates that some functions are mathematically definable but not computable.