Turing machines can be efficiently simulated by the General Purpose Analog Computer

The Church-Turing thesis states that any sufficiently powerful computational model which captures the notion of algorithm is computationally equivalent to the Turing machine. This equivalence usually holds both at a computability level and at a computational complexity level modulo polynomial reductions. However, the situation is less clear in what concerns models of computation using real numbers, and no analog of the Church-Turing thesis exists for this case. Recently it was shown that some models of computation with real numbers were equivalent from a computability perspective. In particular it was shown that Shannon's General Purpose Analog Computer (GPAC) is equivalent to Computable Analysis. However, little is known about what happens at a computational complexity level. In this paper we shed some light on the connections between this two models, from a computational complexity level, by showing that, modulo polynomial reductions, computations of Turing machines can be simulated by GPACs, without the need of using more (space) resources than those used in the original Turing computation, as long as we are talking about bounded computations. In other words, computations done by the GPAC are as space-efficient as computations done in the context of Computable Analysis

Two Classical Queries versus One Quantum Query

In this note we study the power of so called query-limited computers. We compare the strength of a classical computer that is allowed to ask two questions to an NP-oracle with the strength of a quantum computer that is allowed only one such query. It is shown that any decision problem that requires two parallel (non-adaptive) SAT-queries on a classical computer can also be solved exactly by a quantum computer using only one SAT-oracle call, where both computations have polynomial time-complexity. Such a simulation is generally believed to be impossible for a one-query classical computer. The reduction also does not hold if we replace the SAT-oracle by a general black-box. This result gives therefore an example of how a quantum computer is probably more powerful than a classical computer. It also highlights the potential differences between quantum complexity results for general oracles when compared to results for more structured tasks like the SAT-problem.Comment: 6 pages, LaTeX2e, no figures, minor changes and correction