The halting problem is a prominent example of undecidable problem and its formulation and undecidability proof is usually attributed to Turing's 1936 landmark paper. Copeland noticed in 2004, though, that it was so named and, apparently, first stated in a 1958 book by Martin Davis. We provide additional arguments partially supporting this claim as follows: (i) with a focus on computable (real) numbers with infinitely many digits (e.g., π), in his paper Turing was not concerned with halting machines; (ii) the two decision problems considered by Turing concern the ability of his machines to produce specific kinds of outputs, rather than reaching a halting state, something which was missing from Turing's notion of computation; and (iii) from 1936 to 1958, when considering the literature of the field no paper refers to any “halting problem” of Turing Machines until Davis' book. However, there were important preliminary contributions by (iv) Church, for whom termination was part of his notion of computation (for the λ-calculus), and (v) Kleene, who essentially formulated, in his 1952 book, what we know as the halting problem now.

该停机问题是不可判定的问题，它的制定和不可判定性证明的突出的例子通常被认为是图灵1936年里程碑式的论文。不过，谷轮在2004年注意到它如此命名，显然是在马丁·戴维斯（Martin Davis）于1958年出版的书中首次提到的。我们提供了一些额外的论据，部分支持了这一主张，如下所述：（i）在他的论文中，图灵与停止机器无关，其重点是具有无限多个数字（例如π）的可计算（实数）数；（ii）图灵考虑的两个决策问题涉及他的机器产生特定种类输出的能力而不是停止状态，这是图灵的计算概念所缺少的；（1）从1936年到1958年，当考虑到该领域的文献时，直到戴维斯（Davis）的书之前，没有论文提到Turing Machines的任何“停顿问题”。但是，（iv）丘吉尔（他的λ微积分的计算概念的一部分）和（v）克莱恩（Kleene ）做出了重要的初步贡献，他在1952年的书中基本上提出了我们所知道的现在停顿的问题。