Asymptotic proportion of hard instances of the halting problem

DOI10.14232/ACTACYB.21.3.2014.3zbMATH Open1313.68061arXiv1307.7066OpenAlexW2963586885MaRDI QIDQ2937541FDOQ2937541

Authors: Antti Valmari 

Publication date: 9 January 2015

Published in: Acta Cybernetica (Search for Journal in Brave)

Abstract: 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 variant fails to halt, and yet another replies incorrectly "yes" or "no". Also the halting problem has three variants: does a given program halt on the empty input, does a given program halt when given itself as its input, or does a given program halt on a given input. The failure rate of a tester for some size is the proportion of hard instances among all instances of that size. This publication investigates the behaviour of the failure rate as the size grows without limit. Earlier results are surveyed and new results are proven. Some of them use C++ on Linux as the computational model. It turns out that the behaviour is sensitive to the details of the programming language or computational model, but in many cases it is possible to prove that the proportion of hard instances does not vanish.

Full work available at URL: https://arxiv.org/abs/1307.7066

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zbMATH Keywords

halting problemapproximating testergeneric-case testerthree-way tester

Mathematics Subject Classification ID

Theory of programming languages (68N15)

Cited In (4)

• Title not available (Why is that?)
• What percentage of programs halt?
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• Fundamentals of Computation Theory

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