Computation and its Limits

Download or read book Computation and its Limits written by Paul Cockshott and published by OUP Oxford. This book was released on 2012-03-15 with total page 560 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Computation and its Limits is an innovative cross-disciplinary investigation of the relationship between computing and physical reality. It begins by exploring the mystery of why mathematics is so effective in science and seeks to explain this in terms of the modelling of one part of physical reality by another. Going from the origins of counting to the most blue-skies proposals for novel methods of computation, the authors investigate the extent to which the laws of nature and of logic constrain what we can compute. In the process they examine formal computability, the thermodynamics of computation, and the promise of quantum computing.