Standing in the middle of the intersection, shouting "Halt! in the name of the Theorem!" probably wouldn't work so well.
Maybe change the sign from "STOP" to "GO". That'll confuse drivers so much that they'll have to stop and think about it.
Wednesday, January 07, 2009
Full and Complete Stop
(Click on the cartoon to see the entire image.) (C)Copyright 2008, C. Burke. All rights reserved.
Standing in the middle of the intersection, shouting "Halt! in the name of the Theorem!" probably wouldn't work so well.
Maybe change the sign from "STOP" to "GO". That'll confuse drivers so much that they'll have to stop and think about it.
Standing in the middle of the intersection, shouting "Halt! in the name of the Theorem!" probably wouldn't work so well.
Maybe change the sign from "STOP" to "GO". That'll confuse drivers so much that they'll have to stop and think about it.
What can I say: a Full Halt just didn't sound as good.
ReplyDeleteMy professor (actually, he was a Sociology professor, but he taught the Assembly Language class) explained the halting problem like this:
If a program could test itself to see if it was going to run forever, then you could program it to stop.
If the program could test itself and it knew that it was going to stop, you could send it into an infinite loop to keep checking.
Both of those lead to contradictions.