It reminds me of something I had posted to a math/engineering forum some time ago but my answer was taken down because I didn't use proper mathematical terminology and I had ended the comment with a question mark asking for feedback.
My idea was that what if the halting detection function sometimes intentionally lied about whether or not the program halts (E.g. just returned a random true/false 1% the time instead of actually doing the analysis work) then because Turing's proof is recursive (and relies on the occurrence of an infinite recursive deadlock condition), eventually, at a certain random depth in the recursion, the halting detection function would break out of the recursion when it hits that random error case. So the intentional % error added to the halting detection function would prevent hitting the infinite recursion case on which Turing's proof relies. The downside of this approach would be that my hypothetical halting detection function would return incorrect results a certain percentage of the time when applied to other algorithms; but this problem can be offset by running it multiple times against the same input. The accuracy of such a function could approach 100% as you run it more often but never quite reach 100%.
I'm not so sure I understand, because if you do have some code that a turning machine would throw for an infinite loop, wouldn't your 1% trick be the only escape the first time, second time, third time and forth time you tried to run the halting analyzer?
Thus you wouldn't get closer and closer to 100% accuracy, but rather, you'd get the randomness response every single attempt
Given that the analyzer function 'H' needs to work with any algorithm 'F'. We could separate 'F' into two distinct subsets of functions (the union of which fully spans the set of all possible F):
1. 'F1' which represents any possible function which does not invoke the H(F1) function internally.
2. 'F2' which represents any possible function which invokes the H(F2) function internally.
Turing's proof relies entirely on the existence of 'F2' functions and the fact that these kinds of functions always lead to a an infinite loop deadlock condition.
Turing's proof relies on these 'F2' functions as a counter example to prove why H cannot exist.
Turing's proof does not apply for functions of the 'F1' kind.
So my thinking is that assuming that there existed a probabilistic analyzer function `H` which worked with 'F1' functions and which could be modified to also work with 'F2' functions (I.e. by adding a probabilistic error % as I suggested), then that would invalidate Turing's counter-example.
It would not give any answers about the halting problem itself though; just move the problem back to a state of uncertainty.
My idea aims to prove that if you have an 'H' which works for 'F1' then it can be easily modified to also work for 'F2' if you're prepared to accept an error probability each time you run the function.
A key part of my argument is that any F2 function can use an error % as an escape hatch to protect itself from infinite recursion and thus gives those functions the ability to decide their own output.
For these kinds of F2 functions, whatever output H(F2) returns becomes self-fulfilling after the recursion has finished unwinding and so it does not matter if H(F2) is true or false.
But still the diagonalization argument applies. In order for your slightly wrong oracle to work, you still need a 100% correct oracle. Now remove the slightly wrong wrapper, and you are back in square one.
My idea was that what if the halting detection function sometimes intentionally lied about whether or not the program halts (E.g. just returned a random true/false 1% the time instead of actually doing the analysis work) then because Turing's proof is recursive (and relies on the occurrence of an infinite recursive deadlock condition), eventually, at a certain random depth in the recursion, the halting detection function would break out of the recursion when it hits that random error case. So the intentional % error added to the halting detection function would prevent hitting the infinite recursion case on which Turing's proof relies. The downside of this approach would be that my hypothetical halting detection function would return incorrect results a certain percentage of the time when applied to other algorithms; but this problem can be offset by running it multiple times against the same input. The accuracy of such a function could approach 100% as you run it more often but never quite reach 100%.