Analog computers and recursive functions over the reals

Abstract

In this paper we show that Shannon's general purpose analog computer (GPAC) is equivalent to a particular class of recursive functions over the reals with the flavour of Kleene's classical recursive function theory. We first consider the GPAC and several of its extensions to show that all these models have drawbacks and we introduce an alternative continuous-time model of computation that solves these problems. We also show that this new model preserves all the significant relations involving the previous models (namely, the equivalence with the differentially algebraic functions). We then continue with the topic of recursive functions over the reals, and we show full connections between functions generated by the model introduced so far and a particular class of recursive functions over the reals.