[FOM] "algorithm" and the Church-Turing Thesis

[SCOTT RANDAL TIDWELL]

On 8/22/2016 7:00 PM, Richard Heck wrote:
>Turing goes on to give his famous arguments for the Church-Turing thesis,
>one of which consists largely of a philosophical analysis of the notion of
>a "possible process[] which can be carried out in computing a number".
>Surely this question is naturally interpreted as: What are algorithms?

Surely in his 1936 Turing conceives of a "process for computing a number"
as a method of manipulating symbols according to their
syntactic properties. He argues that a process can be carried out by an
idealized human "computer" iff it can be carried out by a Turing machine.
Since the machine is capable only of manipulation of symbols based on their
syntactic properties, the characterization of effective process seems to
follow.

This is a common view and seems to me close to correct. Among other things,
it needs to be generalized to include computations carried out
electronically and neurologically.

Best,

Scott Tidwell
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