Hacker News Reader

I'm confused. Why is the output infinite? Do we know when the hashing was stopped?

I'm not sure this is a decidable problem with just the information you gave.

Did you just make up the problem, or is that inspired from a real world situation?

The "too much time has passed" bound on each iteration guarantees that you don't end up running an iteration forever, and makes the algorithm O(2^N), since the number of programs up to N bits long is 2^(N+1) - 1.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com