Turing Compliant?

[jhefferon at my-deja.com]

  Charles G Waldman <cgw at fnal.gov> wrote:
> Oh goody, it looks like we're about to have another long math
> tangent!
Yes, well, I didn't mean to start anything, I swear!
> I'd be interested to hear what the difference is, according to you,
> between "infinite" and "unbounded".
As an analogy, in a definition of a `book' there is no bound on the
number of words.  But no book is infinite.

True, a book is static while a computational process (the idea that
Turing was trying to capture) can just keep growing but anyway,
unbounded and infinite are different.  I think the post objected to
Turing's model because the machines are infinite, which I don't think
is right.

Somebody else in this thread mentioned quantum computation.  I've tried
to read up on it, but I'm afraid I didn't get it.  Is it the case that
anything quantum computable is Turing computable, that is, quantum
computability may go faster but doesn't add anything actually new?

Jim Hefferon


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