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Toward Distributed Computability Theory

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Book cover Carl Adam Petri: Ideas, Personality, Impact

Abstract

It is usually argued that Turing-complete models of computations are equally expressive. However, the author shows that there are problems in distributed computing that are not solvable in some Turing-complete models, such as the process algebra CCS(25,12), while they are solvable within some classes of Petri nets. Hence, the author argues that Petri nets, in their many facets, are more suitable than sequential models of computation for assessing the relative expressive power of different languages for distributed systems, hence calling for the study of distributed computability theory as a generalization of sequential (or Turing) computability theory.

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Author information

Authors and Affiliations

  1. Dipartimento di Informatica, Scienza e Ingegneria, Università di Bologna, Bologna, Italy

    Roberto Gorrieri

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  1. Roberto Gorrieri
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Correspondence to Roberto Gorrieri .

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Editors and Affiliations

  1. Institut für Informatik, Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin, Berlin, Germany

    Wolfgang Reisig

  2. Leiden Institute of Advanced Computer Science, Leiden University, Leiden, The Netherlands

    Grzegorz Rozenberg

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Gorrieri, R. (2019). Toward Distributed Computability Theory. In: Reisig, W., Rozenberg, G. (eds) Carl Adam Petri: Ideas, Personality, Impact. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-96154-5_18

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-96154-5_18

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  • Publisher Name: Springer, Cham

  • Print ISBN: 978-3-319-96153-8

  • Online ISBN: 978-3-319-96154-5

  • eBook Packages: Computer ScienceComputer Science (R0)

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