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

(Phys.org)--The question of what a computer is capable of, and what it is not, has intrigued computer scientists since the 1930s, when Alonzo Church and Alan Turing began investigating the capabilities and limits of computers. In a new study, researchers have explored the computing abilities of noisy physical systems, which are those that are disturbed by random fluctuations.