> Peter Olcott writes:
>> On 4/20/2012 12:30 AM, Jussi Piitulainen wrote:
>>> Peter Olcott writes:
>>>> On 4/19/2012 10:02 PM, Rick Decker wrote:
>>>>> <sigh>  Just for fun, I'll weigh in on this. This is most
>>>>> emphatically a decidable problem. Exactly one of two deciders is
>>>>> clearly the right one:

>>>>> 1. One which answers "yes" without reading any input, or
>>>>> 2. One which answers "no", also without reading any input.

>>>>> The fact that we don't know which one is correct has no bearing
>>>>> on the decidability of the problem. The fact that there _is_ a
>>>>> decider is all that we're concerned with. I know that this may
>>>>> strike some people as an unsatisfactory answer, but you just
>>>>> have to live with it. The definition of a decidable problem (or
>>>>> language, if you will) is that there is _some_ algorithm that
>>>>> produces a correct answer to the question. The fact that we
>>>>> might not know which one is correct is by definition immaterial.

>>>>> Regards,

>>>>> Rick
>>>> That reasoning seems correct to me.
>>> Yet you will continue to insist that there are _individual
>>> instances_ of the halting problem that may not be decidable. And
>>> that apart from these undecidable instances the halting problem is
>>> decidable, in the sense _you_ have been using the word.
> [description snipped]

>> If this is *not* an undecidable instance then what element of the
>> set {true, false} can the invocation of Halts(M, M) correctly
>> return?
> [description of why both true and false would be incorrect snipped]

>> (3) This only leaves neither true nor false. I am calling this
>> undecidable. What else can it be called?
> Oh, many things. Bad, erroneous, other, neither, third, unfair,
> confusing, frustrating, paradoxical, particular, mysterious,
> classified, funny, unanswerable, inadmissible, illegal, possibly with
> the prefix Halts- for the machine that cannot give the correct answer.

> You need not be stuck with the one word that already has a very
> different meaning in the context where you want to discuss your ideas.
> People keep telling you it has. There are words to choose from.

> Yes, no, maybe. True, false, sorry. Halts, halts not, mu.

> The question remains, is the third answer interesting. And is the
> three-valued thing implementable.

>>> When a Turing machine is run an encoding of itself as a string,
>>> one of Rick's two deciders tells whether it will halt. Do you now
>>> accept this?
>> No for the reasons stated above.
> I knew you would.