{"title":"Computation as Step-Satisfaction","authors":"Oron Shagrir","doi":"10.1093/oso/9780197552384.003.0005","DOIUrl":null,"url":null,"abstract":"The chapter deals with Robert Cummins’s account of computation. In this account, to compute is to execute a program, and program execution is reduced to step-satisfaction. The main claim of this chapter is that step-satisfaction is not a necessary feature of computation. The more general moral is that select architectural profiles, such as step-satisfaction, do not help to distinguish between computing and non-computing. Depending on how it is understood, step-satisfaction either excludes important cases of computing physical systems or is empty, applying to virtually every physical system. The argument rests on the analysis of two examples. One is a thermal device for averaging numbers. The other is an attractor neural network that solves the n-queens problem.","PeriodicalId":222167,"journal":{"name":"The Nature of Physical Computation","volume":"5 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0000,"publicationDate":"2022-02-17","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":"0","resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":null,"PeriodicalName":"The Nature of Physical Computation","FirstCategoryId":"1085","ListUrlMain":"https://doi.org/10.1093/oso/9780197552384.003.0005","RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":null,"ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":null,"EPubDate":"","PubModel":"","JCR":"","JCRName":"","Score":null,"Total":0}
引用次数: 0
Abstract
The chapter deals with Robert Cummins’s account of computation. In this account, to compute is to execute a program, and program execution is reduced to step-satisfaction. The main claim of this chapter is that step-satisfaction is not a necessary feature of computation. The more general moral is that select architectural profiles, such as step-satisfaction, do not help to distinguish between computing and non-computing. Depending on how it is understood, step-satisfaction either excludes important cases of computing physical systems or is empty, applying to virtually every physical system. The argument rests on the analysis of two examples. One is a thermal device for averaging numbers. The other is an attractor neural network that solves the n-queens problem.
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