First phrase was in response to your statement. Second phrase was a followup to my sentence that you dotted out (...). And you accused me of modifying your wording with bad intentions.
>It does not prove that. There are programs that one can prove will halt, and also others that you can prove will not halt.
Semantic error, The halting problem only proves that a program can never CALCULATE or PROVE that a given program will fail to halt. That was what I meant.
>This seems to be demonstrating the same sort of misunderstanding as over what the halting theorem proves. Even where we cannot compute the Kolmogorov complexity, it does not follow that there is not a minimal one. As I mentioned before, the whole idea of Kolmogorov complexity is predicated on there being programs of minimal complexity.
>Going back to that Wikipedia article, we see that "The theorem says that, among algorithms that decode strings from their descriptions (codes), there exists an optimal one."
No. Not a demonstration of misunderstanding of halting. It is a demonstration of misunderstanding of Kolmogorov as you only just introduced me to it today.
Either way given any code, you cannot determine whether it is the most optimal one even if there Does exist an optimal one as the theorem states. So the intent still stands, let me modify the statement to get the semantics correct while preserving the intent:
"For any program you can determine whether Complexity for that program can be reduced or destroyed"
The above statement is False.
So in all practicality even though a simplified statement always exist we can never know if we found it. So the possibility is always there and the intent of what I said is still preserved if not stronger , see initial reply of this post:
"The examples are obvious but from the examples you can deduce that their are many instances in software engineering where such reductions can exist but are not obvious at all."
Kolmogorov still offers axiomatic support for my statement. In fact it makes the statement stronger and changes it too:
"In all instances of software engineering reductions can exist, you can never determine otherwise."
I can't say for sure but I believe that the statement above applies not only to Kolmogorov complexity, but algorithmic complexity as well.
