Related papers: Foreword: A Computable Universe, Understanding Com…
Quantum computers are discussed in the general framework of computation, the laws of physics and the foundations of quantum mechanics.
In physics, there is the prevailing intuition that we are part of a unique external world, and that the goal of physics is to understand and describe this world. This assumption of the fundamentality of objective reality is often seen as a…
Computing is an indispensable component of nearly all technologies and is ubiquitous for vast segments of society. It is also essential to discoveries and innovations in most disciplines. However, while past grand challenges in science have…
Computing is a critical driving force in the development of human civilization. In recent years, we have witnessed the emergence of intelligent computing, a new computing paradigm that is reshaping traditional computing and promoting…
The success of the abstract model of computation, in terms of bits, logical operations, programming language constructs, and the like, makes it easy to forget that computation is a physical process. Our cherished notions of computation and…
The traditional foundation of science lies on the cornerstones of theory and experiment. Theory is used to explain experiment, which in turn guides the development of theory. Since the advent of computers and the development of…
Encouraged by significant advances in algorithms and tools for verification and analysis, high level modeling and programming techniques, natural language programming, etc., we feel it is time for a major change in the way complex software…
The emergence of "big data" offers unprecedented opportunities for not only accelerating scientific advances but also enabling new modes of discovery. Scientific progress in many disciplines is increasingly enabled by our ability to examine…
More than hundred years ago the 'classic physics' was it in its full power, with just a few unexplained phenomena; which however led to a revolution and the development of the 'modern physics'. Today the computing is in a similar position:…
What does it mean to claim that a physical or natural system computes? One answer, endorsed here, is that computing is about programming a system to behave in different ways. This paper offers an account of what it means for a physical…
Is the universe computable? If so, it may be much cheaper in terms of information requirements to compute all computable universes instead of just ours. I apply basic concepts of Kolmogorov complexity theory to the set of possible…
A perplexing problem in understanding physical reality is why the universe seems comprehensible, and correspondingly why there should exist physical systems capable of comprehending it. In this essay I explore the possibility that rather…
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…
Quantum computing is a good way to justify difficult physics experiments. But until quantum computers are built, do computer scientists need to know anything about quantum information? In fact, quantum computing is not merely a recipe for…
In living systems, we often see the emergence of the ingredients necessary for computation -- the capacity for information transmission, storage, and modification -- begging the question of how we may exploit or imitate such biological…
By nature, transmissible human knowledge is enumerable: every sentence, movie, audio record can be encoded in a sufficiently long string of 0's and 1's. The works of G\"odel, Turing and others showed that there are inherent limits and…
The purpose of this note is to raise two different questions, which are rarely if ever considered, and to which, it seems, we lack convincing, systematic answers. These questions can be posed as: - Why do we compute? - What do we compute?…
Computing is a high-level process of a physical system. Recent interest in non-standard computing systems, including quantum and biological computers, has brought this physical basis of computing to the forefront. There has been, however,…
All but a few digital computers used for scientific computations have supported floating-point and digital arithmetic of rather limited numerical precision. The underlying assumptions were that the systems being studied were basically…
Computational scientists are facing a new era where the old ways of developing and reusing code have to be left behind and a few daring steps are to be made towards new horizons. The present work analyzes the needs that drive this change,…