Chapter 4. Foundations of Shared Memory
The foundations of sequential computing were established in the 1930s by Alan Turing and Alonzo Church, who independently formulated what has come to be known as the Church-Turing Thesis: anything that can be computed, can be computed by a Turing Machine (or, equivalently, by Church’s Lambda Calculus). Any problem that cannot be solved by a Turing Machine (such as deciding whether a program halts on any input) is universally considered to be unsolvable by any kind of practical computing device. The Turing Thesis is a thesis, not a theorem, because the notion of “what is computable” can never be defined in a precise, mathematically rigorous way. Nevertheless, just about everyone believes it.
This chapter describes ...
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