Nick: its simple. I married her. Just after explaining Godel to the philosophy department, and to her Ex who promptly left philosophy and became a cardio doctor. True.
In terms of the Halting problem, is Wikipedia too formal? The first two paragraphs: In computability theory, the halting problem can be stated as follows: "Given a description of an arbitrary computer program, decide whether the program finishes running or continues to run forever". This is equivalent to the problem of deciding, given a program and an input, whether the program will eventually halt when run with that input, or will run forever. Alan Turing proved in 1936 that a general algorithm to solve the halting problem for all possible program-input pairs cannot exist. A key part of the proof was a mathematical definition of a computer and program, what became known as a Turing machine; the halting problem is undecidable over Turing machines. It is one of the first examples of a decision problem. Did you find that foreign? Dede doesn't. But then she lived in Silly Valley for 20+ years .. its in the air there. She thinks math is sexy .. well, hmm, that I am and she puts up with the math. Don't forget I invited you to viewing and discussing Michael Sendel's Justice and you never antied up. I think its time you read up on computation theory or discrete math, your choice. You'd love it. We've all jumped into your seminars and read your stuff. Your turn. -- Owen
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