Paper Info
Title
On the Possibilities of Hypercomputing Supertasks
Abstract
This paper investigates the view that digital hypercomputing is a good reason for rejection or re-interpretation of the Church-Turing thesis. After suggestion that such re-interpretation is historically problematic and often involves attack on a straw man (the `maximality thesis'), it discusses proposals for digital hypercomputing with "Zeno-machines", i.e. computing machines that compute an infinite number of computing steps in finite time, thus performing supertasks. It argues that effective computing with Zeno-machines falls into a dilemma: either they are specified such that they do not have output states, or they are specified such that they do have output states, but involve contradiction. Repairs though non-effective methods or special rules for semi-decidable problems are sought, but not found. The paper concludes that hypercomputing supertasks are impossible in the actual world and thus no reason for rejection of the Church-Turing thesis in its traditional interpretation.
Year
DOI
Venue
2011
10.1007/s11023-011-9222-6
Minds and Machines
Keywords
DocType
Volume
Computing,Computability,Hypercomputing,Effective computing,Supertask,Church-Turing thesis,Copeland,Benacerraf,Thomson,Zeno,Zeno-machine,Accelerated Turing machine
Journal
21
Issue
ISSN
Citations 
1
0924-6495
1
PageRank 
References 
Authors
0.36
14
1
Name
Order
Citations
PageRank
Vincent C. Müller1246.21