Related papers: When does a physical system compute?
Computational modeling is a critical tool for understanding consciousness, but is it enough on its own? This paper discusses the necessity for an ontological basis of consciousness, and introduces a formal framework for grounding…
Computation is an input-output process, where a program encoding a problem to be solved is inserted into a machine that outputs a solution. Quantum computation conventionally relies on classical, external control outside the quantum…
Computer systems can be found everywhere: in space, in our homes, in our cars, in our pockets, and sometimes even in our own bodies. For concerns of safety, economy, and convenience, it is important that such systems work correctly.…
This piece plays with the idea of the Computocene: an era defined not merely by the ubiquity of computers, but by their deepening role in how we observe, interpret, and make sense of the world. Rather than emphasizing automation, speed,…
We consider the issue of computability at the most fundamental level of physical reality: the Planck scale. To this aim, we consider the theoretical model of a quantum computer on a non commutative space background, which is a computational…
The increasing difficulty in continued development of digital electronic logic has led to a renewed interest in alternative approaches. Oscillatory computing is one such approach that leverages alternative physical systems and computation…
One of the defining features of living systems is their adaptability to changing environmental conditions. This requires organisms to extract temporal and spatial features of their environment, and use that information to compute the…
The applicability of computational models to the biological world is an active topic of debate. We argue that a useful path forward results from abandoning hard boundaries between categories and adopting an observer-dependent, pragmatic…
When we want to predict the future, we compute it from what we know about the present. Specifically, we take a mathematical representation of observed reality, plug it into some dynamical equations, and then map the time-evolved result back…
This paper discusses the meaning and scope of biological hypercomputation (BH). The framework here is computational, and from the outset it should be clear that life is not a standard Turing Machine. Living systems hypercompute, but the…
What is computable with limited resources? How can we verify the correctness of computations? How to measure computational power with precision? Despite the immense scientific and engineering progress in computing, we still have only…
MemComputing is a new model of computation that exploits the non-equilibrium property-we call 'memory'-of any physical system to respond to external perturbations by keeping track of how it has reacted at previous times. Its digital,…
According to the Church-Turing Thesis (CTT), effective formal behaviours can be simulated by Turing machines; this has naturally led to speculation that physical systems can also be simulated computationally. But is this wider claim true,…
Cellular automata are arrays of finite state machines that can exist in a finite number of states. These machines update their states simultaneously based on specific local rules that govern their interactions. This framework provides a…
In the first of this pair of papers, it was proven that that no physical computer can correctly carry out all computational tasks that can be posed to it. The generality of this result follows from its use of a novel definition of…
While the engineering of operating systems is well understood, their formal structure and properties are not. The latter needs a clear definition of the purpose of an OS and an identification of the core. In this paper I offer definitions…
Computers are physical systems: what they can and cannot do is dictated by the laws of physics. In particular, the speed with which a physical device can process information is limited by its energy and the amount of information that it can…
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:…
Computing systems are omnipresent; their sustainability has become crucial for our society. A key aspect of this sustainability is the ability of computing systems to cope with the continuous change they face, ranging from dynamic operating…
The recent debate on hypercomputation has arisen new questions both on the computational abilities of quantum systems and the Church-Turing Thesis role in Physics. We propose here the idea of "effective physical process" as the essentially…