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by andsoitis 21 days ago
> A physical process involves the transformation of information, so can be studied with a theory of computation.

A rock rolling downhill has state-dependent future behavior you could describe informationally, but nothing is gained by modeling it with automata theory instead of Newtonian mechanics, and it isn't computing in any substantive sense.

1 comments

Quantum mechanics is pretty fundamental but you wouldn't use it to describe a rock rolling down hill either.