19,721 research outputs found
A Survey on Continuous Time Computations
We provide an overview of theories of continuous time computation. These
theories allow us to understand both the hardness of questions related to
continuous time dynamical systems and the computational power of continuous
time analog models. We survey the existing models, summarizing results, and
point to relevant references in the literature
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
The universe as quantum computer
This article reviews the history of digital computation, and investigates
just how far the concept of computation can be taken. In particular, I address
the question of whether the universe itself is in fact a giant computer, and if
so, just what kind of computer it is. I will show that the universe can be
regarded as a giant quantum computer. The quantum computational model of the
universe explains a variety of observed phenomena not encompassed by the
ordinary laws of physics. In particular, the model shows that the the quantum
computational universe automatically gives rise to a mix of randomness and
order, and to both simple and complex systems.Comment: 16 pages, LaTe
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