In computer science, interactive computation is a mathematical model for computation that involves communication with the external world during the computation. This is in contrast to the traditional understanding of computation which assumes a simple interface between a computing agent and its environment, consisting in asking a question (input) and generating an answer (output).
The famous Church-Turing thesis attempts to define computation and computability in terms of Turing machines. However the Turing machine model only provides an answer to the question of what computability of functions means and, with interactive tasks not always being reducible to functions, it fails to capture our broader intuition of computation and computability. While this fact was admitted by Alan Turing himself, it was not until recently that the theoretical computer science community realized the necessity to define adequate mathematical models of interactive computation. Among the currently studied mathematical models of computation that attempt to capture interaction are Japaridze's hard- and easy-play machines elaborated within the framework of computability logic, Goldin's persistent Turing machines, and Gurevich's abstract state machines. Peter Wegner has additionally done a great deal of work on this area of computer science.
Famous quotes containing the word computation:
“I suppose that Paderewski can play superbly, if not quite at his best, while his thoughts wander to the other end of the world, or possibly busy themselves with a computation of the receipts as he gazes out across the auditorium. I know a great actor, a master technician, can let his thoughts play truant from the scene ...”
—Minnie Maddern Fiske (1865–1932)