From: Mikko Särelä (msarela@cc.hut.fi)
Date: Wed Sep 07 2005 - 23:29:10 MDT
On Wed, 7 Sep 2005, Ben Goertzel wrote:
> 6) automatic program-correctness-checking integrated with above system
> And, achieving 3-6 remains far off, and involves a lot of work. 4 is
> of course straightforward work, and 6 is straightforward though subtle,
> but 3 is quite subtle and involves a lot of
> tricky computer science as well as difficult programming.
Actually depending on what you mean by automatic
program-correctness-checking, it may not be simple, nor straightforward.
Automatic program verification for correctness is as a general task
impossible, because in general case it is impossible to tell whether two
Turing machines are equivalent or not. Still, there are people working on
tools that are capable of verifying quite many things even from written
code such as impossibility of getting into a deadlock, or livelock,
etc.
If you mean whether the compiler or some such verifies that the program is
a legal example of the programming language (as for example c and most
other often used languages do), then you are quite right. The task is
quite straightforward and a small amount of understanding of programming
and theory of computation should allow one to do the job.
--
Mikko Särelä
"I find that good security people are D&D players"
- Bruce Schneier
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