English

Real Hypercomputation and Continuity

Logic in Computer Science 2010-05-10 v2 Computational Complexity

Abstract

By the sometimes so-called 'Main Theorem' of Recursive Analysis, every computable real function is necessarily continuous. We wonder whether and which kinds of HYPERcomputation allow for the effective evaluation of also discontinuous f:R->R. More precisely the present work considers the following three super-Turing notions of real function computability: * relativized computation; specifically given oracle access to the Halting Problem 0' or its jump 0''; * encoding real input x and/or output y=f(x) in weaker ways also related to the Arithmetic Hierarchy; * non-deterministic computation. It turns out that any f:R->R computable in the first or second sense is still necessarily continuous whereas the third type of hypercomputation does provide the required power to evaluate for instance the discontinuous sign function.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.cs/0508069,
  title  = {Real Hypercomputation and Continuity},
  author = {Martin Ziegler},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:cs/0508069},
  year   = {2010}
}

Comments

previous version (extended abstract) has appeared in pp.562-571 of "Proc. 1st Conference on Computability in Europe" (CiE'05), Springer LNCS vol.3526