Flutterby™! : Halting Problem 2008-11-26 15:32:54.449778+00

Halting Problem

2008-11-26 15:32:54.449778+00 by Dan Lyke 3 comments

User "AlanT" asks on "Get A Coder" for someone to program a "bug finder":

To state that another way, given a function f and input x, determine if f(x) will halt.

Apparently all of the bids have been removed, which is a shame, 'cause there are alleged to have people claiming to solve this for $300 (Note to the non-geeky, Alan Turing had a very famous proof about this problem back in 1936). The MeFi thread has at least one other giggle:

“Knock, knock.”
“Who’s there?”
very long pause….
“Java.”

I remember an ad on getacoder long ago where they were offering $500 and I believe three months to rewrite windows xp without violating any patents and the new OS had to be "virus-proof." There were quite a few responses from people offering to take on this project.

I don't think just having responses present by itself necessarily means much on getacoder. You can usually find about 20 responses to most jobs, out of those, maybe 3 to 5 of them are valid competent people or companies.

Yeah, I've never looked at GetACoder before, but I assume that there's the usual low-level noise from the equivalent of the Nigerian scammers, people who bid the minimum on everything just in case they can take someone for a few bucks.

I haven't seen so many people that seem like scammers, mostly companies from India or similar who don't understand the scope of the project and are willing to bid on anything. I'm sure the scammers exist, I just haven't seen any that send up immediate red flags.