5 research outputs found
The physical Church-Turing thesis and the principles of quantum theory
Notoriously, quantum computation shatters complexity theory, but is innocuous
to computability theory. Yet several works have shown how quantum theory as it
stands could breach the physical Church-Turing thesis. We draw a clear line as
to when this is the case, in a way that is inspired by Gandy. Gandy formulates
postulates about physics, such as homogeneity of space and time, bounded
density and velocity of information --- and proves that the physical
Church-Turing thesis is a consequence of these postulates. We provide a quantum
version of the theorem. Thus this approach exhibits a formal non-trivial
interplay between theoretical physics symmetries and computability assumptions.Comment: 14 pages, LaTe
Non-classical computing: feasible versus infeasible
Physics sets certain limits on what is and is not computable. These limits are very far from having been reached by current technologies. Whilst proposals for hypercomputation are almost certainly infeasible, there are a number of non classical approaches that do hold considerable promise. There are a range of possible architectures that could be implemented on silicon that are distinctly different from the von Neumann model. Beyond this, quantum simulators, which are the quantum equivalent of analogue computers, may be constructable in the near future
Computations with oracles that measure vanishing quantities
info:eu-repo/semantics/publishedVersio