Abstract
We present a formalization of the halting problem in Agda, a language based on Martin-Löf’s intuitionistic type theory. The key features are:
-
We give a constructive proof of the halting problem. The “constructive halting problem” is a natural reformulation of the classic variant.
-
A new abstract model of computation is introduced, in type theory.
-
The undecidability of the halting problem is proved via a theorem similar to Rice’s theorem.
The central idea of the formalization is to abstract from the details of specific models of computation. This is accomplished by formulating a number of axioms which describe an abstract model of computation, and proving that the halting problem is undecidable in any model described by these axioms.
Access this chapter
Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout
Purchases are for personal use only
Preview
Unable to display preview. Download preview PDF.
References
R. S. Boyer and J. St. Moore. A mechanical proof of the unsolvability of the halting problem. Journal of the Association for Computing Machinery, 31(3):441–458, 1984.
R. Constable and S. Smith. Computational foundations of basic recursive function theory. In Third IEEE Symposium on Logic in Computer Science, pages 360–371, Edinburgh, Scotland, July 1988.
Catarina Coquand. Homepage for Agda. URL: http://www.cs.chalmers.se/~catarina/agda/.
Thierry Coquand. Structured type theory. Postscript format, URL: http://www.cs.chalmers.se/~coquand/STT.ps.Z.
A. P. Ershov. Abstract computability on algebraic structures. In Algorithms in Modern Mathematics and Computer Science, volume 122 of Lecture Notes in Computer Science, pages 397–420, Berlin, Heidelberg, New York, 1981. Springer-Verlag.
Zohar Manna. Mathematical Theory of Computation. McGraw-Hill Book Company, 1974.
George J. Tourlakis. Computability. Reston Publishing Company Inc., Reston, Virginia 22090, 1984.
Eric G. Wagner. Uniformly Reflexive Structures: On the nature of gödelizations and relative computability. Transactions of the American Mathematical Society, 144:1–41, October 1969.
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Editor information
Editors and Affiliations
Rights and permissions
Copyright information
© 2002 Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg
About this paper
Cite this paper
Johannisson, K. (2002). Formalizing the Halting Problem in a Constructive Type Theory. In: Callaghan, P., Luo, Z., McKinna, J., Pollack, R., Pollack, R. (eds) Types for Proofs and Programs. TYPES 2000. Lecture Notes in Computer Science, vol 2277. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg. https://doi.org/10.1007/3-540-45842-5_10
Download citation
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/3-540-45842-5_10
Published:
Publisher Name: Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg
Print ISBN: 978-3-540-43287-6
Online ISBN: 978-3-540-45842-5
eBook Packages: Springer Book Archive