Donald Hoffman

speaker

2,139 appearances 4 recordings 4 series first heard Apr 2025 last heard 26 Jun

Donald Hoffman’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.

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recordings per month · last 12 months

Recordings per month over the last 12 months — 3 in all, peaking in Jun 2026 with 2.

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Well, it hurts me too.

I'm telling you these things, but not because it's easy for me.

My head hurts too thinking about these things.

Well, so the standard story that you'd – if you take a computer science class and –

study of the theory of computation, they'll tell you about something called the halting problem.

This is one of the big problems.

Turing, I believe, posed it and showed that it was not computational.

The question is this.

A universal Turing machine is like a universal computer.

You can give it a program.

Turing thought about putting a tape with some punches on it, essentially.

So you have this tape reader.

And the Turing machine would look at one square on the tape and read that symbol.

And then it would change state and then move left or right and write a symbol.

And that's all the universal Turing machine could do.

And so the question that Turing asked was, suppose we asked the question –

will the Turing machine stop after a finite number of moves?

Will it halt?

On arbitrary sets of these tapes that you're giving it, programs.

That's called the halting problem.

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