

Universal Limits on Computation (2004) [pdf] - anacleto
http://arxiv.org/abs/astro-ph/0404510

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bd
Wouldn't these computation limits get invalidated if some future advanced
civilization / super-human AI came up with warp drives / could use wormholes /
any other loophole around the speed-of-light?

If you could "pierce" speed-of-light limit, at least for signals, even with
extraordinary costs, you may get some sort of distributed computing going on,
potentially unbound (up to the size of full universe, as opposed to observable
universe limited by light cones and expansion of space).

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scottlocklin
I liked Seth Lloyd's earlier paper better:

[http://arxiv.org/abs/quant-ph/9908043](http://arxiv.org/abs/quant-ph/9908043)

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Rainymood
Are arXiv paper peer-reviewed? How are we sure that the papers are of quality?

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nhaehnle
Unfortunately, they are not. Submitters have to be vetted by somebody at some
point, so the people who do submit should usually at least have a university
affiliation (or have had one at some point), but that's a relatively low bar.

I don't know about physics, but in mathematics and theoretical computer
science, there are really two problems that are not solved by arXiv:

1\. We need a way to record mistakes in proofs / get an idea of the level of
confidence in the proofs in papers.

2\. There should be a way to collect papers of significance, to be able to get
an idea of which papers are important.

Both are problems that have been solved in the past (more or less) by
journals, and they are outside the scope of what arXiv is intended to provide.
Nevertheless, there is still a lot of space for clever new models of open
publishing, outside the traditional models. Unfortunately for the audience
here, those problems are mostly social and political rather than technical
(e.g., how do you break the influence of journals in academic hiring
decisions).

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nickpinkston
There's also a fun Wikipedia page on this:

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Limits_to_computation](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Limits_to_computation)

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jestinjoy1
How to make sense for a CS grad. I was expecting something about Turing, Godel
etc

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Sniffnoy
A note -- if you're linking to arXiv, it's better to link to the abstract
([http://arxiv.org/abs/astro-ph/0404510](http://arxiv.org/abs/astro-
ph/0404510), or [http://arxiv.org/abs/astro-
ph/0404510v2](http://arxiv.org/abs/astro-ph/0404510v2) for this specific
version) rather than directly to the PDF. From the abstract, one can easily
click through to the PDF; not so the reverse. And the abstract allows one to
do things like see different versions of the paper, search for other things by
the same authors, etc. Thank you!

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dang
Ok, we changed the url from [http://arxiv.org/pdf/astro-
ph/0404510v2.pdf](http://arxiv.org/pdf/astro-ph/0404510v2.pdf).

