The instructional information processing account of digital computation.
What is nontrivial digital computation? It is the processing of discrete data through discrete state transitions in accordance with finite instructional information. The motivation for our account is that many previous attempts to answer this question are inadequate, and also that this account accor...
| Published in: | Synthese Vol. 191; no. 7; pp. 1469 - 1493 |
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| Main Authors: | , |
| Format: | Article |
| Published: |
Springer Nature
May2014
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| Subjects: | |
| Online Access: | View this record in EBSCOhost |
| Summary: | What is nontrivial digital computation? It is the processing of discrete data through discrete state transitions in accordance with finite instructional information. The motivation for our account is that many previous attempts to answer this question are inadequate, and also that this account accords with the common intuition that digital computation is a type of information processing. We use the notion of reachability in a graph to defend this characterization in memory-based systems and underscore the importance of instructional information for digital computation. We argue that our account evaluates positively against adequacy criteria for accounts of computation. |
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