In memoriam to Alan Turing (http://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alan_Turing)
„In computability theory, the halting problem can be stated as follows: Given a description of an arbitrary computer program, decide whether the program finishes running or continues to run forever. This is equivalent to the problem of deciding, given a program and an input, whether the program will eventually halt when run with that input, or will run forever.
Alan Turing proved in 1936 that a general algorithm to solve the halting problem for all possible program-input pairs cannot exist. A key part of the proof was a mathematical definition of a computer and program, what became known as a Turing machine; the halting problem is undecidable over Turing machines. It is one of the first examples of a decision problem.“
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Halting_problem