Tuesday, March 30, 2021

The Church/Turing Thesis is False

The Church/Turing Thesis [cf. Turing 1936] was developed to that effect that a nondeterministic Turing Machine can perform any computation. The Thesis has been the overwhelming consensus since the 1936.

 

Global states are central to the Church/Turing model of computation. In this model, there is a global state with nondeterministic transition to the next state. A state transition can be initiated by a computation step that specifies that one of a number of specified steps can be executed next. A global-state model of computation has the property of bounded nondeterminism. Bounded nondeterminism means that there is a bound determined in advance for the number of possibilities that a system can explore given that it must always come back with an answer. In the development of a theory of concurrent computation, Dijkstra remained committed to a global state model of computation. This commitment gave rise to the “unbounded nondeterminism” controversy. Digital systems can be physically indeterminate by making use of arbiters in order to resolve reception order in communication between systems. Because of physical indeterminacy, a digital system can have the property of unbounded nondeterminism in that no bound exists when it is started on the number of possibilities that an always-responding digital system can explore. Being restricted to bounded nondeterminism is one the reasons that the Church/Turing model of computation is inadequate for digital computation. Consequently, there are digital computations that cannot be performed by a nondeterministic Turing Machine.

 

See the following for more information:


"Epistemology Cyberattacks"