On 22-7-2009 20:30, somebody wrote:
> "Warp" <war### [at] tagpovrayorg> wrote in message
> news:4a671eb6@news.povray.org...
>> Invisible <voi### [at] devnull> wrote:
> 
>>> It's common knowledge that if you write an arbitrary program in a
>>> Turing-complete programming language, it is impossible to determine
>>> whether the program will ever halt.
> 
>>   That's not stated correctly. It's impossible to create an algorithm
> which
>> would tell for all possible programs whether they terminate or not.
> 
> Even so, one has to be careful, for it's possible to determine if any such
> finite program will halt or not - just run the program until all possible
> states would be exhausted.

Why would the number of states be finite and why do you assume determinism?

Post a reply to this message