The halting problem is the difficulty computer scientists have experienced with shutting up and doing something useful. Many are quite content with trying to solve programs that are "really really hard" , or trying to prove that said problems area in fact "really really hard" or if there is some "not-so-hard" way to solve them. One example of such a problem is determining whether P = NP (which is in fact true when N = 1). The halting problem is also one of these problems. More recently, some have erroneously applied the term to the chatbots and other programs that computer scientists write to take the flak for them and let them shirk their duties plowing the fields.