824 research outputs found

    Some Thoughts on Hypercomputation

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    Hypercomputation is a relatively new branch of computer science that emerged from the idea that the Church--Turing Thesis, which is supposed to describe what is computable and what is noncomputable, cannot possible be true. Because of its apparent validity, the Church--Turing Thesis has been used to investigate the possible limits of intelligence of any imaginable life form, and, consequently, the limits of information processing, since living beings are, among others, information processors. However, in the light of hypercomputation, which seems to be feasibly in our universe, one cannot impose arbitrary limits to what intelligence can achieve unless there are specific physical laws that prohibit the realization of something. In addition, hypercomputation allows us to ponder about aspects of communication between intelligent beings that have not been considered befor

    Stone-Type Dualities for Separation Logics

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    Stone-type duality theorems, which relate algebraic and relational/topological models, are important tools in logic because -- in addition to elegant abstraction -- they strengthen soundness and completeness to a categorical equivalence, yielding a framework through which both algebraic and topological methods can be brought to bear on a logic. We give a systematic treatment of Stone-type duality for the structures that interpret bunched logics, starting with the weakest systems, recovering the familiar BI and Boolean BI (BBI), and extending to both classical and intuitionistic Separation Logic. We demonstrate the uniformity and modularity of this analysis by additionally capturing the bunched logics obtained by extending BI and BBI with modalities and multiplicative connectives corresponding to disjunction, negation and falsum. This includes the logic of separating modalities (LSM), De Morgan BI (DMBI), Classical BI (CBI), and the sub-classical family of logics extending Bi-intuitionistic (B)BI (Bi(B)BI). We additionally obtain as corollaries soundness and completeness theorems for the specific Kripke-style models of these logics as presented in the literature: for DMBI, the sub-classical logics extending BiBI and a new bunched logic, Concurrent Kleene BI (connecting our work to Concurrent Separation Logic), this is the first time soundness and completeness theorems have been proved. We thus obtain a comprehensive semantic account of the multiplicative variants of all standard propositional connectives in the bunched logic setting. This approach synthesises a variety of techniques from modal, substructural and categorical logic and contextualizes the "resource semantics" interpretation underpinning Separation Logic amongst them

    Physics, Topology, Logic and Computation: A Rosetta Stone

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    In physics, Feynman diagrams are used to reason about quantum processes. In the 1980s, it became clear that underlying these diagrams is a powerful analogy between quantum physics and topology: namely, a linear operator behaves very much like a "cobordism". Similar diagrams can be used to reason about logic, where they represent proofs, and computation, where they represent programs. With the rise of interest in quantum cryptography and quantum computation, it became clear that there is extensive network of analogies between physics, topology, logic and computation. In this expository paper, we make some of these analogies precise using the concept of "closed symmetric monoidal category". We assume no prior knowledge of category theory, proof theory or computer science.Comment: 73 pages, 8 encapsulated postscript figure

    Admissibility in Finitely Generated Quasivarieties

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    Checking the admissibility of quasiequations in a finitely generated (i.e., generated by a finite set of finite algebras) quasivariety Q amounts to checking validity in a suitable finite free algebra of the quasivariety, and is therefore decidable. However, since free algebras may be large even for small sets of small algebras and very few generators, this naive method for checking admissibility in \Q is not computationally feasible. In this paper, algorithms are introduced that generate a minimal (with respect to a multiset well-ordering on their cardinalities) finite set of algebras such that the validity of a quasiequation in this set corresponds to admissibility of the quasiequation in Q. In particular, structural completeness (validity and admissibility coincide) and almost structural completeness (validity and admissibility coincide for quasiequations with unifiable premises) can be checked. The algorithms are illustrated with a selection of well-known finitely generated quasivarieties, and adapted to handle also admissibility of rules in finite-valued logics

    Computability and analysis: the legacy of Alan Turing

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    We discuss the legacy of Alan Turing and his impact on computability and analysis.Comment: 49 page

    Condition/Decision Duality and the Internal Logic of Extensive Restriction Categories

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    In flowchart languages, predicates play an interesting double role. In the textual representation, they are often presented as conditions, i.e., expressions which are easily combined with other conditions (often via Boolean combinators) to form new conditions, though they only play a supporting role in aiding branching statements choose a branch to follow. On the other hand, in the graphical representation they are typically presented as decisions, intrinsically capable of directing control flow yet mostly oblivious to Boolean combination. While categorical treatments of flowchart languages are abundant, none of them provide a treatment of this dual nature of predicates. In the present paper, we argue that extensive restriction categories are precisely categories that capture such a condition/decision duality, by means of morphisms which, coincidentally, are also called decisions. Further, we show that having these categorical decisions amounts to having an internal logic: Analogous to how subobjects of an object in a topos form a Heyting algebra, we show that decisions on an object in an extensive restriction category form a De Morgan quasilattice, the algebraic structure associated with the (three-valued) weak Kleene logic K3w\mathbf{K}^w_3. Full classical propositional logic can be recovered by restricting to total decisions, yielding extensive categories in the usual sense, and confirming (from a different direction) a result from effectus theory that predicates on objects in extensive categories form Boolean algebras. As an application, since (categorical) decisions are partial isomorphisms, this approach provides naturally reversible models of classical propositional logic and weak Kleene logic.Comment: 19 pages, including 6 page appendix of proofs. Accepted for MFPS XXX
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