Related papers: When we can trust computers (and when we can't)
New technologies have led to vast troves of large and complex datasets across many scientific domains and industries. People routinely use machine learning techniques to not only process, visualize, and make predictions from this big data,…
A quantum computer has now solved a specialized problem believed to be intractable for supercomputers, suggesting that quantum processors may soon outperform supercomputers on scientifically important problems. But flaws in each quantum…
The rapid evolution of artificial intelligence has led to expectations of transformative impact on science, yet current systems remain fundamentally limited in enabling genuine scientific discovery. This perspective contends that progress…
Quantitative social science is not only about regression analysis or, in general, data inference. Computer simulations of social mechanisms have a 60-year long history. They have been used for many different purposes -- to test scenarios,…
Most continuous mathematical formulations arising in science and engineering can only be solved numerically and therefore approximately. We shall always assume that we're dealing with a numerical approximation to the solution. There are two…
The ultimate limits of computation are not just logical, but physical. We investigate the physical resources -- time, energy, entropy, and free energy -- required to perform computational work. We apply the resulting measures of physical…
Problem-solving has been a fundamental driver of human progress in numerous domains. With advancements in artificial intelligence, Large Language Models (LLMs) have emerged as powerful tools capable of tackling complex problems across…
Quantum computers are believed to surpass the classical ones. Moreover, it is claimed that this belief reaches the level of a mathematically proven fact within the oracle model of computation. Here we impair the whole class of the so-called…
The advent of modern technology, permitting the measurement of thousands of characteristics simultaneously, has given rise to floods of data characterized by many large or even huge datasets. This new paradigm presents extraordinary…
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…
Computational feasibility is a widespread concern that guides the framing and modeling of biological and artificial intelligence. The specification of cognitive system capacities is often shaped by unexamined intuitive assumptions about the…
At the intersection of what I call uncomputable art and computational epistemology, a form of experimental philosophy, we find an exciting and promising area of science related to causation with an alternative, possibly best possible,…
Trusting machine learning algorithms requires having confidence in their outputs. Confidence is typically interpreted in terms of model reliability, where a model is reliable if it produces a high proportion of correct outputs. However,…
Significant advances in the development of computing devices based on quantum effects and the demonstration of their use to solve various problems have rekindled interest in the nature of the "quantum computational advantage." Although…
Quantum computers are becoming real. Therefore, it is promising to use their potentials in different applications areas, which includes research in the humanities. Due to an increasing amount of data that needs to be processed in the…
Artificial computing machinery transforms representations through an objective process, to be interpreted subjectively by humans, so the machine and the interpreter are different entities, but in the putative natural computing both…
Quantum computing promises to provide the next step up in computational power for diverse application areas. In this review, we examine the science behind the quantum hype, and the breakthroughs required to achieve true quantum advantage in…
Physical processes are computations only when we use them to externalize thought. Computation is the performance of one or more fixed processes within a contingent environment. We reformulate the Church-Turing thesis so that it applies to…
Turing's (1936) paper on computable numbers has played its role in underpinning different perspectives on the world of information. On the one hand, it encourages a digital ontology, with a perceived flatness of computational structure…
In considering the reliability of numerical programs, it is normal to "limit our study to the semantics dealing with numerical precision" (Martel, 2005). On the other hand, there is a great deal of work on the reliability of programs that…