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Foundational Analyses of Computation

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How the World Computes (CiE 2012)

Part of the book series: Lecture Notes in Computer Science ((LNTCS,volume 7318))

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Abstract

How can one possibly analyze computation in general? The task seems daunting if not impossible. There are too many different kinds of computation, and the notion of general computation seems too amorphous. As in quicksand, one needs a rescue point, a fulcrum. In computation analysis, a fulcrum is a particular viewpoint on computation that clarifies and simplifies things to the point that analysis becomes possible.

We review from that point of view the few foundational analyses of general computation in the literature: Turing’s analysis of human computations, Gandy’s analysis of mechanical computations, Kolmogorov’s analysis of bit-level computation, and our own analysis of computation on the arbitrary abstraction level.

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Author information

Authors and Affiliations

  1. Microsoft Research, One Microsoft Way, Redmond, WA, 98052-6399, United States of America

    Yuri Gurevich

Authors
  1. Yuri Gurevich
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Editors and Affiliations

  1. School of Mathematics, University of Leeds, LS2 9JT, Leeds, UK

    S. Barry Cooper

  2. Computer Laboratory, University of Cambridge, Willialm Gates Building, J.J. Thomson Avenue, CB3 0FD, Cambridge, UK

    Anuj Dawar

  3. Institute for Logic, Language and Computation, University of Amsterdam, 1090 GE, Amsterdam, The Netherlands

    Benedikt Löwe

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Gurevich, Y. (2012). Foundational Analyses of Computation. In: Cooper, S.B., Dawar, A., Löwe, B. (eds) How the World Computes. CiE 2012. Lecture Notes in Computer Science, vol 7318. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-30870-3_27

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-30870-3_27

  • Publisher Name: Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg

  • Print ISBN: 978-3-642-30869-7

  • Online ISBN: 978-3-642-30870-3

  • eBook Packages: Computer ScienceComputer Science (R0)

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