What exactly is the halting problem?

Question

Whenever people ask about the halting problem as it pertains to programming, people respond with \"If you just add one loop, you\'ve got the halting program and therefore yo

Answer 1

The precise definition of the problem is that you need to write a program that does the following: - takes an arbitrary program - determines if the program halts given any arbitrary finite input into the program

However, this is a really high bar. There are many partial solutions to the halting problem, but no general solution. Even worse, even finding programs that partially solve the halting problem is known to be difficult:

BBC h2g2 article on the halting problem

If you have truly solved the halting problem, there work on sites like rentacoder.com for you. A few months ago there was a post on one of them from a user named ATuring who offered a contract to solve the halting problem. :)