Vulnerability Development mailing list archives

Re: New Binary Bruteforcing Method Discovered


From: Blue Boar <BlueBoar () thievco com>
Date: Thu, 28 Mar 2002 08:58:19 -0800

Michael Wojcik wrote:

The Halting Problem isn't an unsolved conjecture (like P!=NP), it's a proven
theorem.  Turing's proof shows that no Universal Turing Machine can solve
the HP (in finite time, which is the whole point of the HP).  By extension,
no machine less powerful than a UTM can solve it.  That includes digital
computers, which are just resource-constrained Turing Machines.  There's no
"knowing the way to solve" it to be had.

Just to be pedantic (because I was a CS major), the proof shows that
you can't solve the halting problem with a UTM *for all programs*.
You could, for example, design code to determine if hello world
halts.

                                        BB


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