We describe an emerging field, that of nonclassical computability and nonclassical computing machinery. According to the nonclassicist, the set of well-defined computations is not exhausted by the computations that can be carried out by a Turing machine. We provide an overview of the field and a philosophical defence of its foundations.

A version of the Church-Turing Thesis states that every e#ectively realizable physical system can be defined by Turing Machines (`Thesis P'); in this formulation the Thesis appears an empirical, more than a logico-mathematical, proposition. We review the main approaches to computation beyond Turing definability (`hypercomputation'): supertask, non-well-founded, analog, quantum, and retrocausal computation. These models depend on infinite computation, explicitly or implicitly, and appear physically implausible; moreover, even if infinite computation were realizable, the Halting Problem would not be a#ected. Therefore, Thesis P is not essentially di#erent from the standard Church-Turing Thesis.

to a practical application. A dozen years later the first stored-program electronic digital computers began to spring into existence. All were modelled on the universal Turing machine. Today's digital computers also are in essence universal Turing machines. 2. Is There a Known Upper Bound to Computability? Many textbooks on the fundamentals of computer science offer examples of informationprocessing tasks that are, it is claimed, absolutely uncomputable, in the sense that no machine can be specified to carry out these tasks. For example, it is said that no machine can repond to any given (finite) string of binary digits in accordance with the following rules: 3 (1) Answer '1' if the string is a program that will cause a universal Turing machine on whose tape it is inscribed to execute only a finite number of operations (such programs are called 'terminating'). (2) Answer '0' if the string is not a terminating program; i.e. if the st

Recent works have independently suggested that quantum mechanics might permit procedures that fundamentally transcend the power of Turing Machines as well as of ‘standard ’ Quantum Computers. These approaches rely on and indicate that quantum mechanics seems to support some infinite variant of classical parallel computing. We compare this new one with other attempts towards hypercomputation by separating (1) its computing capabilities from (2) realizability issues. The first are shown to coincide with recursive enumerability; the second are considered in analogy to ‘existence’ in mathematical logic. KEY WORDS: Hypercomputation; quantum mechanics; recursion theory; infinite parallelism.

We examine the converse of Church-Turing thesis and establish the existence of uncountable number of accelerated Turing machines. This leads to the case that these machines are una#ected by Godel's incompleteness theorem.

This paper investigates the view that digital hypercomputing is a good reason for rejection or re-interpretation of the Church-Turing thesis. After suggestion that such re-interpretation is historically problematic and often involves attack on a straw man (the ‘maximality thesis’), it discusses proposals for digital hypercomputing with “Zeno-machines”, i.e. computing machines that compute an infinite number of computing steps in finite time, thus performing supertasks. It argues that effective computing with Zeno-machines falls into a dilemma: either they are specified such that they do not have output states, or they are specified such that they do have output states, but involve contradiction. Repairs though noneffective methods or special rules for semi-decidable problems are sought, but not found. The paper concludes that hypercomputing supertasks are impossible in the actual world and thus no reason for rejection of the Church-Turing thesis in its traditional interpretation. 1