March 25th Lecture

Today's lecture was mind blowing. Use a program that is impossible to write in order to write other programs that are also impossible to write? Remember that time Danny Heap asked to raise hands if you are not comfortable with material? I should have had all 2 hands and 2 feet up in the air at that time. Even tracing the navel_gaze program was tough, I kept on forgetting to lie to myself that Halt works. Either way, that was the most interesting thing I learned this year (even more interesting than Sociology). Though 'learn' is not exactly the word for it because I did not understand it but how well can I understand it anyway. I could say I do not understand it and then prove that if I did understand it, the snow would fall into the outer space (joke copyrights: Danny Heap). Not knowing how to implement a program was 'not full understanding' in my terms up to this day. I honestly thought everything could be implemented! But, yeah, how would you check if a program has an infinite loop without setting some certain time to claim it is infinite? I also was not comfortable with contradiction proofs up to this day but this actually taught me contradiction proofs more than anything.