[MUD-Dev] Re: TECH: reliablity (was: Distributed Muds)

[Ola Fosheim Grøstad <olag@ifi.uio.no>]

shren wrote:
> On Tue, 1 May 2001, Alex wrote:

>> last week.  I won't rehash it here, but suffice to say, the general
>> feel was that one or two people claimed that they could write
>> bug-free code and had scripts/programs/etc that would find any bugs
>> that they happened to write when sleepy.  The rest questioned this

> *scratches head*
 
> Wouldn't you have to solve the halting problem to do that?

Not really. It is possible to write a program that proves that a
subset of all possible programs stop. (Any interpreter or computer can
already do this for a specific subset :) Any finite program that only
contain forward jumps will obviously stop.

The halting problem just states that there will exist programs which a
prover cannot determine whether will stop or not. Which is rather
intuitive: write a program that generates some special sequence (maybe
PI?) and stop when a certain substring has been generated.  To prove
that this program does not stop, you will need to prove that the
string does not exist in PI... (Maybe this is possible, but there
certainly are problems which cannot be solved by analytical means)

(Hope I got this right... ;)
--
Ola  -  http://www.notam.uio.no/~olagr/


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