Quotes About Computation

Quantum computation is... a distinctively new way of harnessing nature... It will be the first technology that allows useful tasks to be performed in collaboration between parallel universes.

The theory of computation has traditionally been studied almost entirely in the abstract, as a topic in pure mathematics. This is to miss the point of it. Computers are physical objects, and computations are physical processes. What computers can or cannot compute is determined by the laws of physics alone, and not by pure mathematics.

The purpose of high-level sciences is to enable us to understand emergent phenomena, of which the most important are, as we shall see, life, thought and computation.

The fabric of reality does not consist only of reductionist ingredients like space, time and subatomic particles, but also of life, thought, computation and the other things to which those explanations refer.

Quantum theory is, as I have said, one such theory. But the other three main strands of explanation through which we seek to understand the fabric of reality are all 'high level' from the point of view of quantum physics. They are the theory of evolution (primarily the evolution of living organisms), epistemology (the theory of knowledge) and the theory of computation (about computers and what they can and cannot, in principle, compute).

In fact, from inside the system, the algorithms and mathematical formulae by which the world comes to be assessed become, ultimately, not just measures of value, but the source of value itself.

in real statistical analyses the computer takes over the tedium of arithmetic juggling.

The history of the universe is, in effect, a huge and ongoing quantum computation. The universe is a quantum computer.

If you plug in a number and the math starts getting creepy (anything involving fractions or negative numbers is creepy)...

A computation is a process that obeys finitely describable rules.

I can't read a computer screen and never use a calculator. It's all in my head and by hand.

With me, everything turns into mathematics.

We have not begun to understand the relationship between combinatorics and conceptual mathematics.

The destiny of mankind is not decided by material computation. When great causes are on the move in the world… we learn that we are spirits, not animals, and that something is going on in space and time, and beyond space and time, which, whether we like it or not, spells duty.

The square root sign is a generous symbol, it gives shelter to all the numbers.

All services offered by a module should be available through a uniform notation, which does not betray whether they are implemented through storage or through computation.

Our newly capacious machines can get closer to understanding it than we can, and they, as machines, don't really understand anything at all.

You can't simulate a brain without first understanding what it does.

There are too many of numbers for them to arise as a result of human intellectual activity. Consider, for example, the following series of functions: 2 lambda n is two to the second to the second .... to the second n times. The second member is ##2 (n); the third 3#2(n), etc.

Lately I've been working to convince myself that everything is a computation.

It will take time for the idea of decentralized trust through computation to become a part of mainstream consciousness, and until then, the idea creates cognitive dissonance for those accustomed to centralized trust systems.

I've got the brain for systems and a head for figures.

My talent is numbers.

He who refuses to do arithmetic is doomed to talk nonsense.