Super-recursive algorithm

In computability theory, super-recursive algorithms are a generalization of ordinary algorithms that are more powerful, that is, compute more than Turing machines. The term was introduced by Mark Burgin, whose book "Super-recursive algorithms" develops their theory and presents several mathematical models. Turing machines and other mathematical models of conventional algorithms allow researchers to find properties of recursive algorithms and their computations. In a similar way, mathematical models of super-recursive algorithms, such as inductive Turing machines, allow researchers to find properties of super-recursive algorithms and their computations. Burgin, as well as other researchers (including Selim Akl, Eugene Eberbach, Peter Kugel, Jan van Leeuwen, Hava Siegelmann, Peter Wegner, and Jiří Wiedermann) who studied different kinds of super-recursive algorithms and contributed to the theory of super-recursive algorithms, have argued that super-recursive algorithms can be used to disprove the Church-Turing thesis, but this point of view has been criticized within the mathematical community and is not widely accepted. Burgin (2005: 13) uses the term recursive algorithms for algorithms that can be implemented on Turing machines, and uses the word algorithm in a more general sense. Then a super-recursive class of algorithms is "a class of algorithms in which it is possible to compute functions not computable by any Turing machine" (Burgin 2005: 107). Super-recursive algorithms are closely related to hypercomputation in a way similar to the relationship between ordinary computation and ordinary algorithms. Computation is a process, while an algorithm is a finite constructive description of such a process. Thus a super-recursive algorithm defines a "computational process (including processes of input and output) that cannot be realized by recursive algorithms." (Burgin 2005: 108). A more restricted definition demands that hypercomputation solves a supertask (see Copeland 2002; Hagar and Korolev 2007).