Follow your curiosity

What discovery has been shared with you?

FACTREE gives you something interesting to discover every day — and something worth talking about together.

Start with one fact. Explore it, go deeper, then follow whichever branch catches your imagination.

Choose subjects for a surprise

Exploring any topic

Begin your discovery

Your next discovery is one click away.

Choose one or more subjects above, or leave Any Topic selected and let curiosity decide.

Mathematics

The Turing Machine and the Halting Problem

Quick fact

The halting problem is undecidable: no Turing machine can correctly decide, for every possible program and input, whether that program will finish running or loop forever. This was proven by Alan Turing in 1936, the same year he introduced the Turing machine.

Why this is interesting

Imagine a machine that can compute anything—yet there’s a simple question it can never answer. What is that question?