halting

A man in a gray suit and red tie stands beside a large blue computer box dotted with yellow lights, holding a wooden stick. He says, "The halting problem is easy to solve. If the program runs too long, I take this stick and beat the computer until it stops." A caption below reads: "What if Alan Turing had been an engineer?" The joke recasts the famous unsolvable computer-science halting problem as something an engineer would solve by physically hitting the machine. Votey (aftercomic): a close-up sketch of a skeptical bald man who asks, "But what happens if you try to make the program beat *itself* with a stick?" -- pointing out that the violent solution runs into the same self-referential paradox that makes the halting problem undecidable.