this post was submitted on 02 Mar 2024
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It is rare that I don't understand a nerd joke but I am completely lost
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Halting_problem
Yes I know about the halting problem, I got extra credit in school for writing a paper with a detailed analysis of a busy beaver machine which at the time ran longer than any in the published literature. I just can't understand the joke... are there people on the second track? Won't the train stop wherever the person is, since the person is defined to be left at the place the trolley will stop? Won't the person die of old age? Why does the diagram show them only 50 meters away, where they're definitely going to die one second from now?
HELP I AM CONFUSED I AM TAKING IT TOO SERIOUSLY
Yep, my brain also jammed trying to understand what is meant here. Even though I got a degree in theoretical CS...
My thought is the left track should start the Turing machine, which is more of an infinite sum joke than the halting problem necessarily? Or the halting problem bit is a sort of tangential pun. The right should just be an infinite track with a person at the end.
Edit: I suppose the infinite sum/halting problem are better described as two sides of the same coin than tangential.
We would need to define an oracle that would put the person at that spot though. Right?
Yes I stumbled on the secondary thought process of how many people I'm trying, or not trying to run over....which isn't clear.
Yeah, you're not alone
Desperately tried to make sense of it...