i wonder if anyones ever independently thought of the halting problem and posted it on stack overflow. if so have they ever used the site since
I think it’d be hilarious if the halting problem, or another similarly difficult problem, were solved for the first time in a stack overflow question
At my first job there was a period when people kept anonymously leaving brainteasers on the whiteboard until someone wrote down an answer, and I was obsessed with the idea of finding some unsolved mathematical conjecture but framing it like a brainteaser so that anyone reading it would assume there is a straightforward answer and the brainteaser would just stay up forever even after I left
I eventually honed in on the Collatz conjecture, which I thought I could somehow rephrase as being about a sort of a card game or something, but I couldn't quite think how to frame it and then I quit
I was obsessed with the idea of finding some unsolved mathematical conjecture but framing it like a brainteaser so that anyone reading it would assume there is a straightforward answer
fermat still the goat for kind of doing this with his last theorem
