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When Do Physical Systems Compute?

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My intuition is to throw the term "computation" around very liberally for physical processes, but that's partly just how I was raised. I do get how it sounds odd to say that the planets are computing their orbits, or that collisions of molecules in a gas just so happen to be computing a complicated logical formula, so I'm interested in principled restrictions on the use of the term. See also: Computation, Automata, Languages; Computational Mechanics; Dynamics; Symbolic Dynamics; Physics of Computation and Information permanent link for this note RSS feed for this note

When Do Physical Systems Compute? Notebooks When Do Physical Systems Compute? Last update : 30 Jan 2026 22:05 First version : 21 March 2022 Yet Another Inadequate Placeholder My intuition is to throw the term "computation" around very liberally for physical processes, but that's partly just how I was raised . I do get how it sounds odd to say that the planets are computing their orbits, or that collisions of molecules in a gas just so happen to be computing a complicated logical formula , so I'm interested in principled restrictions on the use of the term. See also: Biological Computers Comput

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