alt Hacker NewsIt's my view of the Halting Problem that we've known for a surprisingly long time that eliminating all software bugs is mathematically impossible and should stop letting perfect get in the way of the good.
Especially with the more recent relative of the Halting Problem combined with the Church-Turing Theorem that found mathematical proof of a "0-day" sandbox escape in the Universal Turing Machine itself.
We have always lived in a house of glass. LLM agents automating trebuchets for rock throwing certainly seems like a bad idea to me and "let's simply eliminate all software vulnerabilities" an interesting bit of ostrich work (stick your head in the sand and hope it all gets better).
This has little to do with the halting problem, because we can choose to not deploy programs (or subroutines) that we want to be terminating but can’t prove that they are terminating. And that goes for any undecidable problem. There is no application where we want the program to have a certain property where we would be forced to deploy a program where we can’t prove the property due to computational theory reasons.
No, the real issue is that for the most we don’t want to put the necessary effort into proving the relevant properties, because it’s costly and time-consuming, and we think we can live with the risk. The issue is not some theoretical inability to do so.