YQI Talk - Gemma De Les Coves - Universitat Pompeu Fabra

Title: Universality and unreachability in physics, computer science, and beyond

Abstract:

Certain statistical physics models are universal, meaning that they can simulate any other spin model (arXiv: 2407.13428). This form of universality is very similar to the universal approximation theorem for machine learning models (arxiv:2507.07669), but is probably weaker than the universality of Turing machines. I will explain our efforts to understand what they have in common, as well their relation to uncomputability or undecidability (arXiv: 2307.06851).

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