A mathematical algorithm is a procedure for performing a computation.
In a sense, the morphology of the eye itself performs a computation.
This means that atoms in different traps could be brought together, made to perform a computation and then separated.
In 2011, Aaronson and his grad student Aleksandr Arkhipov proposed an experiment that, if it worked, would perform a computation not even the most powerful of today's supercomputers could perform.
This means that if a system of particles known as quantum bits, or qubits can be "entangled" together, all the possible combinations of their states can be simultaneously used to perform a computation, at least in theory.
This poses a problem: how can a concrete, physical system perform a computation when computation is defined by an abstract mathematical formalism?
Landauer, who spent more than 40 years at IBM research labs, is perhaps best known for his theories about the physical limits of information processing, such as the minimum energy required to perform a computation.
The software tool defines how to perform a computation efficiently on data read from and written to permanent storage, within the constraints of a given physical computer.
It should be possible to perform a computation encompassing other brain areas, but this was beyond the scope of the present work.
Before optogenetics, neuroscientists were faced with the intractable nightmare of separating causation from correlation, knowing (sometimes) which neurons were associated with a given process without knowing which ones actually performed a given computation.
The security of these public key cryptography mechanisms relies on the fact that on even the fastest computers, performing a particular computation -- factoring, or breaking into their constituent pieces, large numbers -- takes an unimaginably long time.
