Hypercomputation.info

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 s...

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.  

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...