85 pages (more a short book than a long essay!), 2 figures. To appear in "The Once and Future Turing: Computing the World," a collection edited by S. Barry Cooper and Andrew Hodges. And yes, I know Turing is 101 by now. v2: Corrected typos
In honor of Alan Turing's hundredth birthday, I unwisely set out some thoughts about one of Turing's obsessions throughout his life, the question of physics and free will. I focus relatively narrowly on a notion that I call "Knightian freedom": a certain kind of in-principle physical unpredictability that goes beyond probabilistic unpredictability. Other, more metaphysical aspects of free will I regard as possibly outside the scope of science. I examine a viewpoint, suggested independently by Carl Hoefer, Cristi Stoica, and even Turing himself, that tries to find scope for "freedom" in the universe's boundary conditions rather than in the dynamical laws. Taking this viewpoint seriously leads to many interesting conceptual problems. I investigate how far one can go toward solving those problems, and along the way, encounter (among other things) the No-Cloning Theorem, the measurement problem, decoherence, chaos, the arrow of time, the holographic principle, Newcomb's paradox, Boltzmann brains, algorithmic information theory, and the Common Prior Assumption. I also compare the viewpoint explored here to the more radical speculations of Roger Penrose. The result of all this is an unusual perspective on time, quantum mechanics, and causation, of which I myself remain skeptical, but which has several appealing features. Among other things, it suggests interesting empirical questions in neuroscience, physics, and cosmology; and takes a millennia-old philosophical debate into some underexplored territory.
For quantum Turing machines we present three elements: Its components, its time evolution operator and its local transition function. The components are related with the components of deterministic Turing machines, the time evolution operator is related with the evolution of reversible Turing machines and the local transition function is related with the transition function of probabilistic and reversible Turing machines.
Foundations of the notion of quantum Turing machines are investigated. According to Deutsch's formulation, the time evolution of a quantum Turing machine is to be determined by the local transition function. In this paper, the local transition functions are characterized for fully general quantum Turing machines, including multi-tape quantum Turing machines, extending the results due to Bernstein and Vazirani.
The model of local Turing machines is introduced, including classical and quantum ones, in the framework of matrix-product states. The locality refers to the fact that at any instance of the computation the heads of a Turing machine have definite locations. The local Turing machines are shown to be equivalent to the corresponding circuit models and standard models of Turing machines by simulation methods. This work reveals the fundamental connection between tensor-network states and information processing.
We prove that there is no algorithm to tell whether an arbitrarily constructed Quantum Turing Machine has same time steps for different branches of computation. We, hence, can not avoid the notion of halting to be probabilistic in Quantum Turing Machine. Our result suggests that halting scheme of Quantum Turing Machine and quantum complexity theory based upon the existing halting scheme sholud be reexamined.
Ohya and Volovich have proposed a new quantum computation model with chaotic amplification to solve the SAT problem, which went beyond usual quantum algorithm. In this paper, we generalize quantum Turing machine, and we show in this general quantum Turing machine (GQTM) that we can treat the Ohya-Volovich (OV) SAT algorithm.
Using nonstandard analysis, we will extend the classical Turing machines into the internal Turing machines. The internal Turing machines have the capability to work with infinite ($*$-finite) number of bits while keeping the finite combinatoric structures of the classical Turing machines. We will show the following. The internal deterministic Turing machines can do in $*$-polynomial time what a classical deterministic Turing machine can do in an arbitrary finite amount of time. Given an element of $<M;x>\in HALT$ (more precisely, the $*$-embedding of $HALT$), there is an internal deterministic…
As was well known, in classical computation, Turing machines, circuits, multi-stack machines, and multi-counter machines are equivalent, that is, they can simulate each other in polynomial time. In quantum computation, Yao [11] first proved that for any quantum Turing machines $M$, there exists quantum Boolean circuit $(n,t)$-simulating $M$, where $n$ denotes the length of input strings, and $t$ is the number of move steps before machine stopping. However, the simulations of quantum Turing machines by quantum multi-stack machines and quantum multi-counter machines have not been considered, and…
Foundations of the theory of quantum Turing machines are investigated. The protocol for the preparation and the measurement of quantum Turing machines is discussed. The local transition functions are characterized for fully general quantum Turing machines. A new halting protocol is proposed without augmenting the halting qubit and is shown to work without spoiling the computation.
We investigate a 2-spin quantum Turing architecture, in which discrete local rotations α_m of the Turing head spin alternate with quantum controlled NOT-operations. We demonstrate that a single chaotic parameter input α_m leads to a chaotic dynamics in the entire Hilbert-space.
The notion of quantum Turing machines is a basis of quantum complexity theory. We discuss a general model of multi-tape, multi-head Quantum Turing machines with multi final states that also allow tape heads to stay still.
Deutsch, Feynman, and Manin viewed quantum computing as a kind of universal physical simulation procedure. Much of the writing about quantum Turing machines has shown how these machines can simulate an arbitrary unitary transformation on a finite number of qubits. This interesting problem has been addressed most famously in a paper by Deutsch, and later by Bernstein and Vazirani. Quantum Turing machines form a class closely related to deterministic and probabilistic Turing machines and one might hope to find a universal machine in this class. A universal machine is the basis of a notion of pro…
We investigate the iteration of a sequence of local and pair unitary transformations, which can be interpreted to result from a Turing-head (pseudo-spin $S$) rotating along a closed Turing-tape ($M$ additional pseudo-spins). The dynamical evolution of the Bloch-vector of $S$, which can be decomposed into $2^{M}$ primitive pure state Turing-head trajectories, gives rise to fascinating geometrical patterns reflecting the entanglement between head and tape. These machines thus provide intuitive examples for quantum parallelism and, at the same time, means for local testing of quantum network dyna…
Yao (1993) proved that quantum Turing machines and uniformly generated quantum circuits are polynomially equivalent computational models: $t \geq n$ steps of a quantum Turing machine running on an input of length $n$ can be simulated by a uniformly generated family of quantum circuits with size quadratic in $t$, and a polynomial-time uniformly generated family of quantum circuits can be simulated by a quantum Turing machine running in polynomial time. We revisit the simulation of quantum Turing machines with uniformly generated quantum circuits, which is the more challenging of the two simulat…
We construct reversible Boolean circuits efficiently simulating reversible Turing machines. Both the circuits and the simulation proof are rather simple. Then we give a fairly straightforward generalization of the circuits and the simulation proof to the quantum case.
The Kolmogorov complexity of a physical state is the minimal physical resources required to reproduce that state. We define a second quantized quantum Turing machine and use it to define second quantized Kolmogorov complexity. There are two advantages to our approach - our measure of second quantized Kolmogorov complexity is closer to physical reality and unlike other quantum Kolmogorov complexities it is continuous. We give examples where second quantized and quantum Kolmogorov complexity differ.
Quantum measurement is universal for quantum computation. This universality allows alternative schemes to the traditional three-step organisation of quantum computation: initial state preparation, unitary transformation, measurement. In order to formalize these other forms of computation, while pointing out the role and the necessity of classical control in measurement-based computation, and for establishing a new upper bound of the minimal resources needed to quantum universality, a formal model is introduced by means of Measurement-based Quantum Turing Machines.
Quantum measurement is universal for quantum computation. This universality allows alternative schemes to the traditional three-step organisation of quantum computation: initial state preparation, unitary transformation, measurement. In order to formalize these other forms of computation, while pointing out the role and the necessity of classical control in measurement-based computation, and for establishing a new upper bound of the minimal resources needed to quantum universality, a formal model is introduced by means of Measurement-based Quantum Turing Machines.
We want in this article to show the usefulness of Quantum Turing Machine (QTM) in a high-level didactic context as well as in theoretical studies. We use QTM to show its equivalence with quantum circuit model for Deutsch and Deutsch-Jozsa algorithms. Further we introduce a strategy of translation from Quantum Circuit to Quantum Turing models by these examples. Moreover we illustrate some features of Quantum Computing such as superposition from a QTM point of view and starting with few simple examples very known in Quantum Circuit form.
In this paper, we consider Turing machines based on unsharp quantum logic. For a lattice-ordered quantum multiple-valued (MV) algebra E, we introduce E-valued non-deterministic Turing machines (ENTMs) and E-valued deterministic Turing machines (EDTMs). We discuss different E-valued recursively enumerable languages from width-first and depth-first recognition. We find that width-first recognition is equal to or less than depth-first recognition in general. The equivalence requires an underlying E value lattice to degenerate into an MV algebra. We also study variants of ENTMs. ENTMs with a class…
This paper extends work done to date on quantum computation by associating potentials with different types of computation steps. Quantum Turing machine Hamiltonians, generalized to include potentials, correspond to sums over tight binding Hamiltonians each with a different potential distribution. Which distribution applies is determined by the initial state. An example, which enumerates the integers in succession as binary strings, is analyzed. It is seen that for some initial states the potential distributions have quasicrystalline properties and are similar to a substitution sequence.
Purdue University（普渡大学）；Oak Ridge National Laboratory（橡树岭国家实验室）
Beginning with Turing's seminal work in 1950, artificial intelligence proposes that consciousness can be simulated by a Turing machine. This implies a potential theory of everything where the universe is a simulation on a computer, which begs the question of whether we can prove we exist in a simulation. In this work, we construct a relative model of computation where a computable \textit{local} machine is simulated by a \textit{global}, classical Turing machine. We show that the problem of the local machine computing \textbf{simulation properties} of its global simulator is undecidable in the…
We define a subclass of quantum Turing machine (QTM) named SR-QTM, which halts deterministically and has deterministic tape head position. A quantum state transition diagram (QSTD) is proposed to describe SR-QTM. With the help of QSTD, we construct a SR-QTM which is universal for all near-trivial transformations. This means there exists a QTM which is universal for the above subclass. Finally we prove that SR-QTM is computational equivalent with ordinary QTM in the bounded error setting. It can be seen that, because SR-QTM has the same time steps for different branches of computation, the halt…
A denotational semantics of quantum Turing machines having a quantum control is defined in the dagger compact closed category of finite dimensional Hilbert spaces. Using the Moore-Penrose generalized inverse, a new additive trace is introduced on the restriction of this category to isometries, which trace is carried over to directed quantum Turing machines as monoidal automata. The Joyal-Street-Verity Int construction is then used to extend this structure to a reversible bidirectional one.
