This is a report on the Computability in Europe Conference (CiE), held at the University of Swansea, Wales in the United Kingdom in July 2006.

I attended a mini-course on Quantum Computing given by Julia Kempe, a lecture on the Church-Turing thesis by Martin Davis– who defended it against proposed models of hypercomputation– and a  lecture on Proof Theory. Another very interesting lecture was on Godel and Turing’s remarks on the Human Mind (the dichotomy argument from Godel and the mechanistic vision from Turing). Among other noteworthy lectures were Samuel Buss’ on Complexity of Proofs, John Dawson’s on Godel in Computability, Wilfried Sieg’s on the Concept of Mechanical Procedure in Godel and Turing, as well as many presentations on hypercomputability and computing over the reals. I met people whom I had only known through email exchanges, like Felix Da Costa from the Technological Institute of Lisbon, Robert Meyer professor emeritus at the National University of Australia, and Julia Kempe from France who is a renowned researcher in the quantum computing field and with whom I shared some doubts I had concerning where the restrictions in Quantum Computing lay which constrained its power to the set of recursive functions. I also met people from SUNY who are doing interesting research on Turing-computation, studying isomorphisms between Oracle machines and the relation with the Tenenbaum theorem upon the uniqueness of the recursive model of PA (Peano Arithmetic). Many lectures were given on computing over infinite time and space and computing at the limit of the general relativity theory. The conference was intended to take the pulse of the field of hypercomputation in Europe and worldwide.

Last Modified : May 17th, 2008 Filed under : Computability, Universality and Unsolvability, Computer Science, Conferences, Foundations of Computation Navigate : Previous post / Next post