The diagonal method and hypercomputation

British Journal for the Philosophy of Science 56 (1):147-156 (2005)
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Abstract

The diagonal method is often used to show that Turing machines cannot solve their own halting problem. There have been several recent attempts to show that this method also exposes either contradiction or arbitrariness in other theoretical models of computation which claim to be able to solve the halting problem for Turing machines. We show that such arguments are flawed—a contradiction only occurs if a type of machine can compute its own diagonal function. We then demonstrate why such a situation does not occur for the methods of hypercomputation under attack, and why it is unlikely to occur for any other serious methods. Introduction Issues with specific hypermachines Conclusions for hypercomputation.

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Toby Ord
University of Oxford

Citations of this work

The Physical Church–Turing Thesis: Modest or Bold?Gualtiero Piccinini - 2011 - British Journal for the Philosophy of Science 62 (4):733-769.
A brief critique of pure hypercomputation.Paolo Cotogno - 2009 - Minds and Machines 19 (3):391-405.
On TAE Machines and Their Computational Power.Apostolos Syropoulos - 2019 - Logica Universalis 13 (2):165-170.

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References found in this work

On Computable Numbers, with an Application to the Entscheidungsproblem.Alan Turing - 1936 - Proceedings of the London Mathematical Society 42 (1):230-265.
Classical recursion theory: the theory of functions and sets of natural numbers.Piergiorgio Odifreddi - 1989 - New York, N.Y., USA: Sole distributors for the USA and Canada, Elsevier Science Pub. Co..
Theory of Recursive Functions and Effective Computability.Hartley Rogers - 1971 - Journal of Symbolic Logic 36 (1):141-146.
Classical Recursion Theory.Peter G. Hinman - 2001 - Bulletin of Symbolic Logic 7 (1):71-73.
Hypercomputation.B. Jack Copeland - 2002 - Minds and Machines 12 (4):461-502.

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