Related papers: A Computational Anthropic Principle: Where is the …

Algorithmic approach is based on the assumption that any quantum evolution of many particle system can be simulated on a classical computer with the polynomial time and memory cost. Algorithms play the central role here but not the…

As inductive inference and machine learning methods in computer science see continued success, researchers are aiming to describe ever more complex probabilistic models and inference algorithms. It is natural to ask whether there is a…

Although various limits on the predicability of physical phenomena as well as on physical knowables are commonly established and accepted, we challenge their ultimate validity. More precisely, we claim that fundamental limits arise only…

This is a brief review of the experimental and theoretical quantum computing. The hopes for eventually building a useful quantum computer rely entirely on the so-called "threshold theorem". In turn, this theorem is based on a number of…

Fairness is one of the most desirable societal principles in collective decision-making. It has been extensively studied in the past decades for its axiomatic properties and has received substantial attention from the multiagent systems…

In this first of two papers, strong limits on the accuracy of physical computation are established. First it is proven that there cannot be a physical computer C to which one can pose any and all computational tasks concerning the physical…

The Born rule may be stated mathematically as the rule that probabilities in quantum theory are expectation values of a complete orthogonal set of projection operators. This rule works for single laboratory settings in which the observer…

The universal validity of the second law of thermodynamics is widely attributed to a finely tuned initial condition of the universe. This creates a problem: why is the universe atypical? We suggest that the problem is an artefact created by…

The uncertainty principle, which bounds the uncertainties involved in obtaining precise outcomes for two complementary variables defining a quantum particle, is a crucial aspect in quantum mechanics. Recently, the uncertainty principle in…

The observable universe is necessarily hospitable for life. There are indications, however, that the laws of physics and cosmological parameters need not take the form and values observed, and if they were slightly different life could not…

We study the limit computability of finding a global optimum of a continuous function. We give a short proof to show that the problem of checking whether a point is a global minimum is not limit computable. Thereby showing the same for the…

The idea of a multiverse -- an ensemble of universes or universe domains -- has received increasing attention in cosmology, both as the outcome of the originating process that generated our own universe, and as an explanation for why our…

Increasingly encompassing models have been suggested for our world. Theories range from generally accepted to increasingly speculative to apparently bogus. The progression of theories from ego- to geo- to helio-centric models to universe…

Many extensions of the Standard Model predict large numbers of additional unstable particles whose decays in the early universe are tightly constrained by observational data. For example, the decays of such particles can alter the ratios of…

We argue that the total observable entropy is bounded by the inverse of the cosmological constant. This holds for all space-times with a positive cosmological constant, including cosmologies dominated by ordinary matter, and recollapsing…

We prove a lower bound on the relative entropy between two finite-dimensional states in terms of their entropy difference and the dimension of the underlying space. The inequality is tight in the sense that equality can be attained for any…

Given a knowledge base KB containing first-order and statistical facts, we consider a principled method, called the random-worlds method, for computing a degree of belief that some formula Phi holds given KB. If we are reasoning about a…

Physical cosmology tries to understand the Universe at large with its origin and evolution. Observational and experimental situations in cosmology do not allow us to proceed purely based on the empirical means. We examine in which sense our…

Eternal inflation is a seemingly generic consequence of theories that give rise to accelerated expansion of the universe and possess multiple vacuum states. Making predictions in an eternally inflating universe is notoriously difficult…

The quantification of aleatoric and epistemic uncertainty in terms of conditional entropy and mutual information, respectively, has recently become quite common in machine learning. While the properties of these measures, which are rooted…