Ep 124: David Deutsch’s ”The Fabric of Reality” Chapter 6 “Universality and the limits of Computation”
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Churing's Chewing Machine
Churing's model of computation and his conception of the nature of the problem he was solving was the closest to being physical. His abstract computer, the chewring machine, was abstracted from the idea of a paper tape divided into squares with one of a finite number of easily distinguishable symbals written on each square. He conjectured that repertoire consisted precisely of every function that would naturally be regarded as computable. But mathematicians are rather untypical physical objects. Why should we assume that rendering them in the act of performing calculations is the ultimate computational tasks?
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