Turing's Thesis and a More General Physical Principle

Recently, Matthew P. Szudzik posted an article to the arXiv
 server that is entitled "Is Turing's Thesis the Consequence of a More General Physical Principle?" Szudzik ivnestigates Robert Rosen’s hypotheses, which were put forth in "Church’s thesis and its relation to the concept of realizability in biology and physics". Roughly, one can say that these hypotheses state that the universe is discrete, deterministic, and computable.  A direct consequence of these hypotheses is the Church-Turing Thesis. Szudzik recognizes that these hypptheses are not correct and, thus, one needs to reformulate them:

This sort of reformulation was first attempted by Konrad Zuse [18, 19] in the 1960’s. Since then, increasingly sophisticated attempts have been made by Edward Fredkin [3] and Stephen Wolfram [17]. In contrast, Roger Penrose [9, 10] has speculated that the universe might not be computable, but efforts to find experimental evidence for this assertion have not succeeded.

Unfortunately, Szudzik ignores a number of papers that clearly demonstrate that there non-computable phenomena in the universe. In addition, he has failed to put hypercomputation in the picture. One could easily say that there are phenomena that are not computable but which are clearly hypercomputable. Nevertheless, a major problem with Szudzik's approach is that he assumes that we  have deep understanding of the laws of the universe, when in fact we know next to nothing!  

Hypercomputation and Economics

I have been thinking for many years why economists usually fail to make any reliable predictions. And when one does make some reliable predictions, then she is considered phenomenal! But if economics is to be considered a science, then it should be able to make reliable predictions, otherwise it is completely worthless. First of all economics is a social science. Thus, in order  to make trustworthy predictions, one must ensure that an economic system is computable and, why not, deterministic. Economics systems consist of agents (ordinary people) that interact and create the world we see around us. But how can be so sure that the behavior of these agents is computable? In fact we are not and, furthermore, we shouldn't! One of the basic ideas of hypercomputation is that the human mind, ergo our agents, has capabilities computational, hypercomputational, and paracomputational (i.e., abilities that lie outside computation as we presently know it). In different words, economics is bound to fail unless economic theoreticians will not adopt a different way of thinking.

The universe as a quantum computer

The other day I was skimming through Lee Smolin's The Trouble with Physics. On pages 317-138 one can read the following:

In the context of quantum gravity, it resulted in a new approach to quantum cosmology, made by Fotini Markopoulou and her collaborators. Markopoulou emphasized that describing the exchange of information between different subsystems is the same as describing the causal structure that limits which system can influence each other. She thus found that a universe can be described as a quantum computer, with a dynamically generated logic.

With all due respect, the idea that the universe is a computer was put forth by Konrad Zuse in his Rechnender Raum.  Furthemore, Zuse's ideas form in a way the basis of digital philosophy. Whether the universe is a computer or not is another discussion that I have addressed briefly in an older post.

A brain simulator

SpiNNaker is a project to create a simulator of the human brain, The computer will consist of up to a million ARM cores to host a brain simulator. But as Steve Furber of the University of Manchester has correctly noted "[t]here are about 100 billion neurons with 1,000 trillion connections in the human brain. Even a machine with one million of the specialized ARM processor cores developed at Manchester would only allow modeling of about 1 percent of the human brain." Nevertheless, I am sure such a project will provide some scientific knowledge.

New Worlds of Computation 2011

The second workshop New Worlds of Computation, which was organized by the Laboratoire d'Informatique Fondamentale d'Orléans, took place in Orléans from May 23 till May 24. A number of researchers, mostly from France, gathered and presented their work and ideas regarding computation. Françoise Chatelin talked about the necessity to use mathematical tools in computability theory that have been largely ignored until now. Obviously, such a mathematical tools include fuzzy sets, quaternions, etc. Sama Goliaei talked about her work in optical computing. Mike Stannett talked about his joint-work in cosmological computation (i.e., the exploitation of the properties of the space-time to perform hard and "impossible" computations).  Yaroslav D. Sergeyev presented his "numbering system of infinity" and its use in computation (a possibility that was mentioned in my book on hypercomputation). My talk was about vagueness and its use in computation. Unfortunately, some speakers were not talking loudly so I missed (most of ) their  talks. Below is a picture that was taken just after the launch break:

Unfortunately, it was not possible to stay one more day, but my overall impression was more than positive! Jérôme Durand-Lose, our host and organizer of NWC 2011, talked about his plans to make NWC a biennial event with formal proceedings, etc. I believe this is wonderful idea and I wish him all the best in this endeavor.

Commercial Quantum Computer

D-Wave, a Canadian technology company, has announced that they have sold their first commercial quantum computer to Lockheed Martin Corporation. The intriguing thing about D-Waves technology is that they were claiming to use the technology Tien D. Kieu has used in his adiabatic quantum computing method, which is a hypercomputational method.

 

Building a brain?

Today Spiegel Online International posted an article entitled Researchers Hope to Build a Brain. The article discusses the efforts of the Blue Brain Project team (the article wrongly states that the team's name is Human Brain Project). The problem is that the article as well as the people involved with this project use the terms simulation and building almost  interchangeably, which is wrong. To build a brain means to actually construct something that will function as a brain, while simulating means that the team will write software that will function similar to bran. I can imagine that such a simulation could be implemented in an object-oriented way, where each neuron will be simulated by a very complex object. Obviously, all these objects would form a network. Now, how will they respond to external stimuli? Moreover, what will count as an external stimulus? All in all, even the simulation of the brain is a very ambitious project and I don't think we are ready to implement it.