AIC Seminar Series

Recent years have seen a resurgence of interest in non-standard models of computation, including physically-inspired models of analog and quantum computers as well as mathematically-inspired models like the Blum-Shub-Smale model of real-number computation. In this talk I will explore whether and to what extent computers conceived along these lines are faster than standard Turing-style computers, and whether any of them can, as is often proposed, compute "uncomputable" functions. The underlying issue in this discussion is the as-yet-unsettled question of what it means, in general, to compute!

Steven Weinstein received his PhD in Philosophy from Northwestern University in 1998, and has been a postdoctoral fellow at the University of British Columbia and Dartmouth College, and a visiting professor at Dartmouth and Princeton University. He is currently Assistant Professor of Philosophy at University of Waterloo, cross-appointed to the Dept of Physics. He is also an affiliate of the Perimeter Institute for Theoretical Physics in Waterloo. Professor Weinstein works primarily in the foundations of physics, and has published on conceptual problems in quantum gravity, on foundational issues in quantum theory, and on Maxwell's Demon and the Second Law of Thermodynamics.

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