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From: berger@aecom.UUCP (Micha Berger)
Newsgroups: net.philosophy,net.ai
Subject: A Halting followup
Message-ID: <2190@aecom.UUCP>
Date: Tue, 14-Jan-86 00:55:19 EST
Article-I.D.: aecom.2190
Posted: Tue Jan 14 00:55:19 1986
Date-Received: Fri, 17-Jan-86 01:08:05 EST
Distribution: net
Organization: Yeshiva University, NYC, NY
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Xref: watmath net.philosophy:3771 net.ai:3171

In the name of fair play, here is the oppositions comments.



Your assertion that humans can decide the halting problem
doen't stand up under inspection.  Consider a program
that looks for counter-examples to Fermat's Last Theorem.
Mathematicians have trying to prove for many years that
such program will never halt.

Rich


Supposing the procedure halt initiated a background process which
periodically monitored the progress of the procedures, testing 
for a consistent pattern of execution and checking the stack for
possible recursion. 

This is incredibly simplified, but isn't this basically what the
human mind would do in the same situation?

					-- Carl C. Hewitt