New limit to the Church-Turing thesis accounts for noisy systems

Princeton Professor Mark Braverman and PhD student Jonathan Schneider are featured in a news article at phys.org this week.  "While previously it has seemed that physical systems may violate the Church-Turing thesis—a conjecture that in a sense defines a computer—here the researchers show that this is not the case for noisy systems due to a new computing limit. The results could have implications for designing super-Turing computers, or 'hypercomputers,' which are hypothetical devices that outperform all existing computers."

The Church-Turing thesis is named, of course, for Princeton professor Alonzo Church and his PhD student Alan Turing, back in 1936.