X-Message-Number: 23867
Date: Mon, 12 Apr 2004 00:55:04 -0700
From: Mike Perry <>
Subject: Goedel Undecidability

Robert Ettinger, #23848, writes:


>Furthermore, Goedel's conclusion was a mere language trick and of no 
>mathematical significance. He only showed that it is possible to label certain

Goedel's result of showing that undecidable propositions exist is closely 
related to the unsolvability of the Halting Problem for Turing machines, 
which is equivalent to saying you can't write a computer program that will 
decide, beforehand, yes or no, whether a given computer program will ever 
stop running or not. That result does not seem like a mere language trick. 
It does have practical (as well as mathematical) significance.

Mike Perry

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