Reflections on a Symposium on Computation

Abstract

ACM Ubiquity hosted a symposium in 2010–2011 on Turing’s question, ‘What is computation?’ The editor reflects on how the symposium was organized and what conclusions it reached. The authors showed strong consensus around the propositions that computation is a process, computational model matters, many computations are natural, many important computations are continuous, many important computations are nonterminating and computational thinking has emerged as a core practice of computing. They left open the questions of whether the Turing model is the best reference model, is computational necessarily a physical process, what is information and what is an algorithm.