SLOG 10 November 23rd 2014

During this two lecture week, I learned about the existence of problems that cannot be solved through algorithms.  During the first lecture, the professor introduced the problem about finding out whether or not a program will halt, or stop, either because it has completed its task, or due to some error.  We can't simply run the code and determine whether or not it will halt, because we cannot determine whether the program is taking a long time or if it is stuck in an infinite loop that will never end.  However, there is a function called halt which is able to return a boolean representing whether or not the function being tested will halt.  One of the problems that the professor introduced to us is about the function naval gaze.  What naval gaze does is that it calls halt upon halt, and the conclusion is that the results are always contradicting what the function is supposed to do.  I did not understand exactly how this concept worked, and i was planning on studying the notes this weekend, however the course website is not yet functioning, and all of the links of the cache didn't work, so I'm planning on going to the professor's office hours next week in order to get a better idea of why some probems can't be solved through computations.