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Cake day: March 22nd, 2025

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  • First, there’s no “somehow magically” about it, the entire logic of the halting problem’s proof relies on being able to set up a contradiction. I’ll agree that returning undecidable doesn’t solve the problem as stated because the problem as stated only allows two responses.

    My wider point is that the Halting problem as stated is a purely academic one that’s unlikely to ever cause a problem in any real world scenario. Indeed, the ability to say “I don’t know” to unsolvable questions is a hot topic of ongoing LLM research.



  • skisnow@lemmy.catoTechnology@lemmy.mlLLMs Will Always Hallucinate
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    1 month ago

    Mathematically you might be able to prove I don’t always (and I’m not convinced of that even; I don’t think there is an inherent contradiction like the one used for the proof of Halting), but the bar for acceptable false positives is sufficiently low and the scenario is such an edge case of an edge case of an edge case, that anyone trying to use the whole principle to argue anything about real-world applications is grasping at straws.


  • skisnow@lemmy.catoTechnology@lemmy.mlLLMs Will Always Hallucinate
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    1 month ago

    The thing that always bothered me about the Halting Problem is that the proof of it is so thoroughly convoluted and easy to fix (simply add the ability to return “undecidable”) that it seems wanky to try applying it as part of a proof for any kind of real world problem.

    (Edit: jfc, fuck me for trying to introduce any kind of technical discussion in a pile-on thread. I wasn’t even trying to cheerlead for LLMs, I just wanted to talk about comp sci)