Re: GUT and P=NP

[jamesd@netcom.com (James A. Donald)]

Mike McNally writes
> 
> 
> James A. Donald writes:
>  > Existing physical theories show that Super Turing machines are
>  > possible in principle though very difficult to build in practice.
> 
> That's the understatement of the year.

I was referring to the proposed quantum computers.

> 
>  > Such machines will probably not be able to solve NP complete
>  > problems though they will be able to solve some NP problems
>  > such as factoring.
> 
> Huh?
> 
>  > Since such machines do not operate algorithmically
> 
> This statement is exactly wrong.  Such machines *define* a class of
> algorithms.

I recommend that you read the following paper.

E. Bernstein and U. Vazirani, {\it Quantum Complexity
Theory}, Proc. 25th ACM Symp. on Theory of Computation, pp.  11--20
(1993).


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