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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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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