T-Rex fancies himself a computer scientist.
Of course, a real computer scientist knows he's wrong.
(Which isn't all that surprising, after all.)
The halting problem is well-known to be undecidable.
'Undecidable' means you can't solve it.
Well, you can solve it in certain special cases.
But you can't solve it in general.
Ironically, the proof is roughly similar to T-Rex's idea.
Suppose that H is a program that solves the halting problem.
In other words, H takes a program and tells you if it halts.
Now let's define a new program P.
P also takes a program as input.
P calls H to see if its input halts or not.
If H says it halts, then P runs an infinite loop.
Otherwise, P halts.
Now, what happens if you give P itself as input?
If H says P halts, then P will loop forever.
Obviously, this is impossible, so P doesn't halt.
However, if H says P runs forever, then P will halt.
So then P can't run forever.
But now we have a contradiction!
Since we've now said P can neither halt nor run forever!
Which is obviously impossible.
The only assumption that we made was that H exists.
So, by contradiction, we've proved that H can't exist.
Therefore, you can't solve the halting problem.
Now the question is, how will T-Rex learn he's wrong?
Well, I know, since I wrote this comic.
(Or, at least, filled in the words. But I digress.)
You'll find out if you read all the way through.
Well, technically, you don't have to do that.
The first six panels repeat a total of 49 times.
The only thing that changes is this mouse-over text.
(Which I bet nobody is actually going to read.)
The last six panels is the moment of truth.
So be sure you don't skip over that.
Hmmm. What else can I talk about?
Oh!
Did you ever notice how T-Rex is colored differently in panel 5?
He's a slightly different shade than in the other panels.
I don't think a comic has ever played off that before.
Alas, I'm not going to be doing that here.
But if you need an idea for a comic, well, there you go.
If you can figure out a joke based on that, at least.
Well, it looks like we're finally nearing the end.
Thanks for taking the time to read this far.
Unless you cheated by looking at the HTML source.
Although that would be less time-consuming.
Repetition 49 and I'm feeling fine!
T-Rex isn't speechless; he just lost his voice after talking for 305 panels.