Impossible Programs: a great lecture on some of computer science’s most important subjects
Here’s a 40-minute video in which Tom Stuart gives a talk summarizing one of the chapters from him new book Understanding Computation,
describing the halting state problem and how it relates to bugs, Turing
machines, Turing completeness, computability, malware checking for
various mobile app stores, and related subjects. The Halting State
problem — which relates to the impossibility of knowing what a program
will do with all possible inputs — is one of the most important and
hardest-to-understand ideas in computer science, and Stuart does a fantastic
job with it here. You don’t need to be a master programmer or a
computer science buff to get it, and even if you only absorb 50 percent
of it, it’s so engagingly presented, and so blazingly relevant to life
in the 21st century, that you won’t regret it.
(Source: https://player.vimeo.com/)