Related papers: Concurrent computing machines and physical space-t…
Concurrent systems identify systems, either software, hardware or even biological systems, that are characterized by sets of independent actions that can be executed in any order or simultaneously. Computer scientists resort to a causal…
Computation models such as circuits describe sequences of computation steps that are carried out one after the other. In other words, algorithm design is traditionally subject to the restriction imposed by a fixed causal order. We address a…
We investigate the relationship between computation and spacetime structure, focussing on the role of closed timelike curves (CTCs) in promoting computational speedup. We note first that CTC traversal can be interpreted in two distinct…
The increasing relevance of areas such as real-time and embedded systems, pervasive computing, hybrid systems control, and biological and social systems modeling is bringing a growing attention to the temporal aspects of computing, not only…
The constraints arising for a general set of causal relations, both classically and quantumly, are still poorly understood. As a step in exploring this question, we consider a coherently controlled superposition of "direct-cause" and…
Cyber-physical systems (CPS) integrate sensing, computing, communication and actuation capabilities to monitor and control operations in the physical environment. A key requirement of such systems is the need to provide predictable…
A temporal logic is presented for reasoning about the correctness of timed concurrent constraint programs. The logic is based on modalities which allow one to specify what a process produces as a reaction to what its environment inputs.…
The payload performance of conventional computing systems, from single processors to supercomputers, reached its limits the nature enables. Both the growing demand to cope with "big data" (based on, or assisted by, artificial intelligence)…
Tasks that one wishes to have done by a computer often come with conditions that relate to timescales. For instance, the processing must terminate within a given time limit; or a signal processing computer must integrate input information…
Concurrency, the art of doing many things at the same time is slowly becoming a science. It is very difficult to master, yet it arises all over modern computing systems, both when the communication medium is shared memory and when it is by…
We investigate if physical laws can impose limit on computational time and speed of a quantum computer built from elementary particles. We show that the product of the speed and the running time of a quantum computer is limited by the type…
Clocks are a central part of many computing paradigms, and are mainly used to synchronise the delicate operation of switching, necessary to drive modern computational processes. Unfortunately, this synchronisation process is reaching a…
This paper reviews connections between physics and computation, and explores their implications. The main topics are computational "hardness" of physical systems, computational status of fundamental theories, quantum computation, and the…
We provide an overview of theories of continuous time computation. These theories allow us to understand both the hardness of questions related to continuous time dynamical systems and the computational power of continuous time analog…
Our computers today, from sophisticated servers to small smartphones, operate based on the same computing model, which requires running a sequence of discrete instructions, specified as an algorithm. This sequential computing paradigm has…
Recent theoretical results confirm that quantum theory provides the possibility of new ways of performing efficient calculations. The most striking example is the factoring problem. It has recently been shown that computers that exploit…
While the relationship of time and space is an established topic in traditional centralised complexity theory, this is not the case in distributed computing. We aim to remedy this by studying the time and space complexity of algorithms in a…
Computation nowadays is becoming inherently concurrent, either because of characteristics of the hardware (with multicore processors becoming omnipresent) or due to the ubiquitous presence of distributed systems (incarnated in the…
The existence of time machines, understood as spacetime constructions exhibiting physically realised closed timelike curves (CTCs), would raise fundamental problems with causality and challenge our current understanding of classical and…
The advent of quantum computing has challenged classical conceptions of which problems are efficiently solvable in our physical world. This motivates the general study of how physical principles bound computational power. In this paper we…