Two aspects of the physical side of the Church-Turing thesis are discussed. The first issue is a variant of the Eleatic argument against motion, dealing with Zeno squeezed time cycles of computers. The second argument reviews the issue of one-to-one computation, that is, the bijective (unique and reversible) evolution of computations and its relation to the measurement process.
It is possible in principle to construct quantum mechanical observables and unitary operators which, if implemented in physical systems as measurements and dynamical evolution, would contradict the Church-Turing thesis, which lies at the foundation of computer science. Elsewhere we have argued that the quantum measurement problem implies a finite, computational model of the measurement and evolution of quantum states. If correct, this approach helps to identify the key feature that can reconcile quantum mechanics with the Church-Turing thesis: finitude of the degree of fine-graining of Hilbert…
Landauer's principle claims that "Information is Physical." It is not surprising that its conceptual antithesis, Wheeler's "It from Bit," has been more popular among computer scientists --- in the form of the Church-Turing hypothesis: All natural processes can be computed by a universal Turing machine; physical laws then become descriptions of subsets of observable, as opposed to merely possible, computations. Switching back and forth between the two traditional styles of thought, motivated by quantum-physical Bell correlations and the doubts they raise about fundamental space-time causality, …
Boson-sampling is a highly simplified, but non-universal, approach to implementing optical quantum computation. It was shown by Aaronson and Arkhipov that this protocol cannot be efficiently classically simulated unless the polynomial hierarchy collapses, which would be a shocking result in computational complexity theory. Based on this, numerous authors have made the claim that experimental boson-sampling would provide evidence against, or disprove, the Extended Church-Turing thesis -- that any physically realisable system can be efficiently simulated on a Turing machine. We argue against thi…
An integrable anharmonic oscillator is presumably simulable by a classical computer and therefore by a quantum computer. An integrable anharmonic oscillator whose Hamiltonian is of normal type and quartic in the canonical coordinates is not quantizable. If, as argued here, quantum simulation of a finitely realizable classical physical system entails quantization of that system, then either there exist nonsimulable, integrable anharmonic oscillators or there are no obstructions to quantization by simulation. Simulation quantization implies further that any obstructions to quantization arise ent…
The quantum-Extended Church-Turing thesis is a principle of physics as well as computer science. It asserts that the laws of physics will prevent the construction of a machine that can efficiently determine the results of any calculation which cannot be done efficiently by a quantum Turing machine (or a universal quantum circuit). In this note I will argue that an observer falling into a black hole can learn the result of such a calculation in a very short time, thereby seemingly violating the thesis. A viable reformulation requires that the thesis only applies to observers who have access to …
Notoriously, quantum computation shatters complexity theory, but is innocuous to computability theory. Yet several works have shown how quantum theory as it stands could breach the physical Church-Turing thesis. We draw a clear line as to when this is the case, in a way that is inspired by Gandy. Gandy formulates postulates about physics, such as homogeneity of space and time, bounded density and velocity of information --- and proves that the physical Church-Turing thesis is a consequence of these postulates. We provide a quantum version of the theorem. Thus this approach exhibits a formal no…
The Church-Turing thesis asserts that if a partial strings-to-strings function is effectively computable then it is computable by a Turing machine. In the 1930s, when Church and Turing worked on their versions of the thesis, there was a robust notion of algorithm. These traditional algorithms are known also as classical or sequential. In the original thesis, effectively computable meant computable by an effective classical algorithm. Based on an earlier axiomatization of classical algorithms, the original thesis was proven in 2008. Since the 1930s, the notion of algorithm has changed dramatica…
There exists a growing literature on the so-called physical Church-Turing thesis in a relativistic spacetime setting. The physical Church-Turing thesis is the conjecture that no computing device that is physically realizable (even in principle) can exceed the computational barriers of a Turing machine. By suggesting a concrete implementation of a beyond-Turing computer in a spacetime setting, István Németi and Gyula Dávid (2006) have shown how an appreciation of the physical Church-Turing thesis necessitates the confluence of mathematical, computational, physical, and indeed cosmological ideas…
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 give a set of sufficient conditions on the experimental Boson-Sampling computer to satisfy Theorem 1.3 of Aaronson & Arkhipov (Theory of Computing \textbf{9}, 143 (2013)) stating a computational problem whose simulation on a classical computer would collapse the polynomial hierarchy of the computational complexity to the third level. This implies that such an experimental device is in conflict with the Extended Church-Turing thesis. In practical terms, we give a set of sufficient conditions for the scalability of the experimental Boson-Sampling computer beyond the power of the classical com…
We clarify the confusion, misunderstanding and misconception that the physical finiteness of the universe, if the universe is indeed finite, would rule out all hypercomputation, the kind of computation that exceeds the Turing computability, while maintaining and defending the validity of Turing computation and the Church-Turing thesis.
We construct quantum mechanical observables and unitary operators which, if implemented in physical systems as measurements and dynamical evolutions, would contradict the Church-Turing thesis which lies at the foundation of computer science. We conclude that either the Church-Turing thesis needs revision, or that only restricted classes of observables may be realized, in principle, as measurements, and that only restricted classes of unitary operators may be realized, in principle, as dynamics.
The conceptual relation between the measurability of quantum mechanical observables and the computability of numerical functions is re-examined. A new formulation is given for the notion of measurability with finite precision in order to reconcile the conflict alleged by M. A. Nielsen [Phys. Rev. Lett. 79, 2915 (1997)] that the measurability of a certain observable contradicts the Church-Turing thesis. It is argued that any function computable by a quantum algorithm is a recursive function obeying the Church-Turing thesis, whereas any observable can be measured in principle.
We show that the time evolution of an open quantum system, described by a possibly time dependent Liouvillian, can be simulated by a unitary quantum circuit of a size scaling polynomially in the simulation time and the size of the system. An immediate consequence is that dissipative quantum computing is no more powerful than the unitary circuit model. Our result can be seen as a dissipative Church-Turing theorem, since it implies that under natural assumptions, such as weak coupling to an environment, the dynamics of an open quantum system can be simulated efficiently on a quantum computer. Fo…
Quantum computers are unnecessary for exponentially-efficient computation or simulation if the Extended Church-Turing thesis---a foundational tenet of computer science---is correct. The thesis would be directly contradicted by a physical device that efficiently performs a task believed to be intractable for classical computers. Such a task is BosonSampling: obtaining a distribution of n bosons scattered by some linear-optical unitary process. Here we test the central premise of BosonSampling, experimentally verifying that the amplitudes of 3-photon scattering processes are given by the permane…
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, or do behaviours exist which are strictly hypercomputational? Several idealised computational models are known which suggest the possibility of hypercomputation, some Newtonian, some based on cosmology, some on quantum theory. While these models' physicality is debatable, they nonetheless throw into question the validity of extending CTT to include all physic…
Starting from Landauer's slogan "information is physical," we revise and modify Landauer's principle stating that the erasure of information has a minimal price in the form of a certain quantity of free energy. We establish a direct link between the erasure cost and the work value of a piece of information, and show that the former is essentially the length of the string's best compression by a reversible computation. We generalize the principle by deriving bounds on the free energy to be invested for --- or gained from, for that matter --- a general computation. We then revisit the second law…
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 physical notion of computation. By using the Bohm and Hiley active information concept we analyze the differences between the standard form (quantum gates) and the non-standard one (adiabatic and morphogenetic) of Quantum Computing, and we point out how its Super-Turing potentialities derive from an incomputable information source in accordance with Bell's c…
The Church-Turing thesis is one of the pillars of computer science; it postulates that every classical system has equivalent computability power to the so-called Turing machine. While this thesis is crucial for our understanding of computing devices, its implications in other scientific fields have hardly been explored. Here we start this research programme in the context of quantum physics and show that computer science laws have profound implications for some of the most fundamental results of the theory. We first show how they question our knowledge on what a mixed quantum state is, as we i…
In this thesis, we introduce a new quantum Turing machine (QTM) model that supports general quantum operators, together with its pushdown, counter, and finite automaton variants, and examine the computational power of classical and quantum machines using small space bounds in many different cases. The main contributions are summarized below. Firstly, we consider QTMs in the unbounded error setting: (i) in some cases of sublogarithmic space bounds, the class of languages recognized by QTMs is shown to be strictly larger than that of classical ones; (ii) in constant space bounds, the same result…
The recent debate on hyper-computation has raised new questions both on the computational abilities of quantum systems and the Church-Turing Thesis role in Physics. We propose here the idea of geometry of effective physical process as the essentially physical notion of computation. In Quantum mechanics we cannot use the traditional Euclidean geometry but we introduce more sophisticate non Euclidean geometry which include a new kind of information diffuse in the entire universe and that we can represent as Fisher information or active information. We remark that from the Fisher information we c…
We give a computational complexity argument against the feasibility of quantum computers. We identify a very low complexity class of probability distributions described by noisy intermediate-scale quantum computers, and explain why it will allow neither good-quality quantum error-correction nor a demonstration of "quantum supremacy." Some general principles governing the behavior of noisy quantum systems are derived. Our work supports the "physical Church thesis" studied by Pitowsky (1990) and follows his vision of using abstract ideas about computation to study the performance of actual physi…
Both deterministic and indeterministic physical laws are incompatible with control by genuine (non-illusory) free will. We propose that an indeterministic dynamics can be $weakly$ compatible with free will (FW), whereby the latter acts by altering the probability distribution over allowed outcomes. In the quantum physical world, such a FW can collapse the wave function, introducing deviations from the Born rule. In principle, this deviation would stand in conflict with both special relativity and (a variant of) the Strong Church-Turing thesis, implying that the brain may be an arena of exotic,…