Computability logic

Article summary

Computability logic (CoL) is a research program and mathematical framework for redeveloping logic as a systematic formal theory of computability, as opposed to classical logic, which is a formal theory of truth. It was introduced and so named by Giorgi Japaridze in 2003. In classical logic, formulas represent true/false statements. In CoL, formulas represent computational problems. In classical logic, the validity of an argument depends only on its form, not on its meaning. In CoL, validity means being always computable. More generally, classical logic tells us when the truth of a given statement always follows from the truth of a given set of other statements. Similarly, CoL tells us when the computability of a given problem A always follows from the computability of other given problems B 1 ,...,B n . Moreover, it provides a uniform way to actually construct a solution (algorithm) for such an A from any known solutions of B 1 ,...,B n . CoL formulates computational problems in their most general—interactive—sense. CoL defines a computational problem as a game played by a machine against its environment. Such a problem is computable if there is a machine that wins the game against every possible behavior of the environment. Such a game-playing machine generalizes the Church–Turing thesis to the interactive level.…

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