Church-Turing thesis

Church-Turing thesis is a hypothesis about the nature of computable functions. It comes from the demonstration that a general solution to the Entscheidungsproblem is impossible. Church-Turing thesis states that a function on the natural numbers is computable by a human being following an algorithm, ignoring resource limitations, if and only if it is computable by a Turing machine. The thesis is named after American mathematician Alonzo Church and the British mathematician Alan Turing. Before the precise definition of computable function, mathematicians often used the informal term effectively calculable to describe functions that are computable by paper-and-pencil methods. In the 1930s, several independent attempts were made to formalize the notion of computability:

• Kurt Gödel, with Jacques Herbrand, created a formal definition of a class called general recursive functions. Also known as μ-recursive functions.
• Alonzo Church created a method for defining functions called the λ-calculus. Within λ-calculus, he defined an encoding of the natural numbers called the Church numerals. A function on the natural numbers is called λ-computable if the corresponding function on the Church numerals can be represented by a term of the λ-calculus.
• Church’s work, Alan Turing created a theoretical model for machines, now called Turing machines, that could carry out calculations from inputs by manipulating symbols on a tape. Given a suitable encoding of the natural numbers as sequences of symbols, a function on the natural numbers is called Turing computable if some Turing machine computes the corresponding function on encoded natural numbers.

Church and Turing proved that these three formally defined classes of computable functions coincide: a function is λ-computable if and only if it is Turing computable if and only if it is general recursive. This has led mathematicians and computer scientists to believe that the concept of computability is accurately characterized by these three equivalent processes. Other formal attempts to characterize computability have subsequently strengthened this belief.

On the other hand, the Church-Turing thesis states that the above three formally-defined classes of computable functions coincide with the informal notion of an effectively calculable function. Since, as an informal notion, the concept of effective calculability does not have a formal definition, the thesis, although it has near-universal acceptance, cannot be formally proven.

Since its inception, variations on the original thesis have arisen, including statements about what can physically be realized by a computer in our universe (Physical Church-Turing Thesis) and what can be efficiently computed (Complexity-Theoretic Church–Turing Thesis). These variations are not due to Church or Turing, but arise from later work in complexity theory and digital physics. The thesis also has implications for the philosophy of mind.

See also

Artificial Intelligence, Computer Complexity, Turing Machines, Automata theory, Theory of computation

Material

• Rabin, Michael O. (June 2012). Turing, Church, Gödel, Computability, Complexity and Randomization: A Personal View.

Papers

• Alonzo Church, An unsolvable problem of elementary number theory, American Journal of Mathematics, 58 (1936), pp 345–363
• Turing, Alan M. (1936-37). On Computable Numbers, With An Application to the Entscheidungsproblem. Proceedings of the London Mathematical Society, Series 2 42: 230-265.