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Re:New organisms have been formed using the first ever 6-let... by BraveNewCurency on Sunday January 29, 2017 @11:16PM (#13518595)
No, the parent is actually talking about the Halting Problem. It has been proven impossible to predict when a program will exit without actually executing the program. (except in a few trivial edge cases)

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Halting_problem

Re:New organisms have been formed using the first ever 6-let... by harveywi on Monday January 30, 2017 @10:20AM (#13521829)
Minor detail, but the undecidability Halting Problem strictly requires an infinite tape (infinite storage space).

In "practice", if you could call it such, a computer with limited memory becomes a "linear bounded automaton" and the Halting Problem is decidable; cf. http://cs.stackexchange.com/q/22925

Of course, big enough memory can mean that it can be impossible to detect termination before the heat death of the universe - we are talking theory here.

Re:New organisms have been formed using the first ever 6-let... by beaconstudios on Monday January 30, 2017 @05:43AM (#13520001)
actually, the proof for the halting problem is rather esoteric in its demonstration. The claim isn't that you can't predict when most programs will end, but that it's possible to construct a scenario where the program goes out of its way to be unpredictable by running the prediction algorithm on itself and inverting the answer using an infinite loop.