Related papers: Most Programs Stop Quickly or Never Halt
The halting problem is undecidable --- but can it be solved for "most" inputs? This natural question was considered in a number of papers, in different settings. We revisit their results and show that most of them can be easily proven in a…
The halting problem for Turing machines is decidable on a set of asymptotic probability one. Specifically, there is a set B of Turing machine programs such that (i) B has asymptotic probability one, so that as the number of states n…
The halting problem is considered to be an essential part of the theoretical background to computing. That halting is not in general computable has supposedly been proved in many text books and taught on many computer science courses, in…
Although the halting problem is undecidable, imperfect testers that fail on some instances are possible. Such instances are called hard for the tester. One variant of imperfect testers replies "I don't know" on hard instances, another…
Through a straightforward Bayesian approach we show that under some general conditions a maximum running time, namely the number of discrete steps performed by a computer program during its execution, can be defined such that the…
Proving programs terminating is a fundamental computer science challenge. Recent research has produced powerful tools that can check a wide range of programs for termination. The analog for probabilistic programs, namely termination with…
There are several forms of irreducibility in computing systems, ranging from undecidability to intractability to nonlinearity. This paper is an exploration of the conceptual issues that have arisen in the course of investigating speed-up…
The Halting problem of a quantum computer is considered. It is shown that if halting of a quantum computer takes place the associated dynamics is described by an irreversible operator.
We position Turing's result regarding the undecidability of the halting problem as a result about programs rather than machines. The mere requirement that a program of a certain kind must solve the halting problem for all programs of that…
Consider a universal Turing machine that produces a partial or total function (or a binary stream), based on the answers to the binary queries that it makes during the computation. We study the probability that the machine will produce a…
As inductive inference and machine learning methods in computer science see continued success, researchers are aiming to describe ever more complex probabilistic models and inference algorithms. It is natural to ask whether there is a…
We prove that there is no algorithm to tell whether an arbitrarily constructed Quantum Turing Machine has same time steps for different branches of computation. We, hence, can not avoid the notion of halting to be probabilistic in Quantum…
The authors present evidence for universality in numerical computations with random data. Given a (possibly stochastic) numerical algorithm with random input data, the time (or number of iterations) to convergence (within a given tolerance)…
We argue that the halting problem for quantum computers which was first raised by Myers, is by no means solved, as has been claimed recently. We explicitly demonstrate the difficulties that arise in a quantum computer when different…
Computation plays a key role in predicting and analyzing natural phenomena. There are two fundamental barriers to our ability to computationally understand the long-term behavior of a dynamical system that describes a natural process. The…
The Turing machine halting problem can be explained by several factors, including arithmetic logic irreversibility and memory erasure, which contribute to computational uncertainty due to information loss during computation. Essentially,…
Taking the view that computation is after all physical, we argue that physics, particularly quantum physics, could help extend the notion of computability. Here, we list the important and unique features of quantum mechanics and then…
This paper proposes a thought experiment to search for efficient bounded algorithms of NPC problems by machine enumeration. The key contributions are: -- On Universal Turing Machines, a program's time complexity should be characterized as:…
Is there any hope for quantum computing to challenge the Turing barrier, i.e. to solve an undecidable problem, to compute an uncomputable function? According to Feynman's '82 argument, the answer is {\it negative}. This paper re-opens the…
Classical models of computation traditionally resort to halting schemes in order to enquire about the state of a computation. In such schemes, a computational process is responsible for signalling an end of a calculation by setting a halt…