Document Type
Article
Publication Date
2012
Abstract
David Chalmers has defended an account of what it is for a physical system to implement a computation. The account appeals to the idea of a “combinatorial-state automaton” or CSA. It is not entirely clear whether Chalmers intends the CSA to be a full-blown computational model, or merely a convenient formalism into which instances of other models can be translated. I argue that the CSA is not a computational model in the usual sense because CSAs do not perspicuously represent algorithms, and because they are too powerful both in that they can perform any computation in a single step and in that without so far unspecified restrictions they can “compute” the uncomputable. In addition, I suggest that finite, inputless CSAs have trivial implementations very similar to those they were introduced to avoid.
Publisher
Seoul National University
Repository Citation
Brown, C. (2012). Combinatorial-state automata and models of computation. Journal of Cognitive Science, 13(1), 51-73.
Publication Information
Journal of Cognitive Science