从工程视角解读有界停机问题与通用机器的可观测性质

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Abstract:The halting problem asks whether a program eventually halts, with unrestricted resources. Engineering systems instead certify bounded halting: given a program, an input, and a step budget T, decide whether the program halts within T steps. This paper studies two of its uses. First, it defines an exact finite-budget problem, placing the simulated program and the checker on the same unit-cost timescale, so the checker can be embedded in an adversarial program. A diagonal argument with explicit additive overhead shows that no fixed deterministic checker decides every instance within any fixed fraction of T below one, for large T. In the nondeterministic case, T bounds the branch depth allowed for a stable observable decision. Second, bounded-halting instances give adversarial tests for finitary universality, since a universal model must support arbitrary finite computations as T grows. The tests check resource growth with T, the absence of a fixed deliberation bound, and later access to intermediate data. They separate a fixed model with extendable external resources, a model family that grows with T, and a larger system built around a fixed component. For machine-learning systems, this identifies the resource growth a universality claim assumes and whether it fails for deployed models.

Submission history

From: Sergey Salishev [view email]
[v1] Wed, 4 Nov 2026 10:36:39 UTC (34 KB)