Detecting infinite loop in brainfuck program

Question

I have written a simple brainfuck interpreter in MATLAB script language. It is fed random bf programs to execute (as part of a genetic algorithm project). The problem I face is,

Answer 1

Off the top of my head (and I could be wrong), I would think it would be a little bit difficult to detect whether or not a program has an infinite loop without actually executing the program itself.

As the conditional execution of portions of the program depends on the execution state of the program, it will be difficult to know the particular state of the program without actually executing the program.

If you don't require that a program with an infinite loop be executed, you could try having an "instructions executed" counter, and only execute a finite number of instructions. This way, if a program does have an infinite loop, the interpreter can terminate the program which is stuck in an infinite loop.