Speaker: Bruno Loff (CWI)

Location: CWI portacabins (Kruislaan 413c), downstairs seminar room (C001)

This talk will describe part of Bruno Loffs MSc thesis, and includes joint work with Edwin Beggs, José Félix Costa, and John Tucker. 

Bruno Loff: "Part of my thesis was concerned with the relationship between physics and computation. Throughout the last few years, some scientists have come up with bizarre examples of physical systems that seem to compute more, or faster, than a Turing machine. I will give examples of such systems, and in these examples it will become clear that they function only through the use of outdated physical assumptions. However, in the process, we will construct a set of 'thinking tools' that should help us to further investigate the relationship between physics and computation. We will then apply these thinking tools to try and answer the following question: 'Suppose there was an uncomputable real-valued physical constant, which could be measured in some way. Can we use this physical constant in any useful way, in order to decide more sets than a Turing machine?'."