Related papers: Universal Limits on Computation
The finite age of the universe and the existence of cosmological horizons provides a strong argument that the observable universe represents a finite causal region with finite material and informational resources. A similar conclusion…
``The purpose of life is to obtain knowledge, use it to live with as much satisfaction as possible, and pass it on with improvements and modifications to the next generation.'' This may sound philosophical, and the interpretation of words…
As we begin to reach the limits of classical computing, quantum computing has emerged as a technology that has captured the imagination of the scientific world. While for many years, the ability to execute quantum algorithms was only a…
One might think that, once we know something is computable, how efficiently it can be computed is a practical question with little further philosophical importance. In this essay, I offer a detailed case that one would be wrong. In…
Recent investigations into the physical nature of information and fundamental limits to information transmission have revealed questions such as the possibility of superluminal data transfer or not; and whether reversible computation…
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…
Fault-tolerant schemes can use error correction to make a quantum computation arbitrarily ac- curate, provided that errors per physical component are smaller than a certain threshold and in- dependent of the computer size. However in…
This article addresses the question of when physical laws and their consequences can be computed. If a physical system is capable of universal computation, then its energy gap can't be computed. At an even more fundamental level, the most…
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…
Is the dynamical evolution of physical systems objectively a manifestation of information processing by the universe? We find that an affirmative answer has important consequences for the measurement problem. In particular, we calculate the…
Information must take up space, must weigh, and its flux must be limited. Quantum limits on communication and information storage leading to these conclusions are here described. Quantum channel capacity theory is reviewed for both steady…
Discoveries of fundamental limits for the rates of physical processes, from the speed of light to the Lieb-Robinson bound for information propagation, often lead to breakthroughs in the our understanding of the underlying physics. Here we…
Recent advances in quantum resource theories have been driven by the fact that many quantum information protocols make use of different facets of the same physical features, e.g. entanglement, coherence, etc. Resource theories formalise the…
It is not known what the limitations are on using quantum computation to speed up classical computation. An example would be the power to speed up PSPACE-complete computations. It is also not known what the limitations are on the duration…
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…
In order to find out the limiting speed of solving a specific problem using computer, this essay provides a method based on information entropy. The relationship between the minimum computational complexity and information entropy change is…
Computational methods are the most effective tools we have besides scientific experiments to explore the properties of complex biological systems. Progress is slowing because digital silicon computers have reached their limits in terms of…
Insofar as quantum computation is faster than classical, it appears to be irreversible. In all quantum algorithms found so far the speed-up depends on the extra-dynamical irreversible projection representing quantum measurement. Quantum…
There has been no lack of coverage in the past few years in scientific journals of the topic of quantum computation. Rightly so, as this is a novel idea with--so far--at least one very important practical application (prime factorisation)…
To better understand the deep significance of our best physical theories it could be interesting to compare our Universe with its models. It may happen that the differences between the model and reality can be made indistinguishable, to the…