Does Quantum Mechanics allow for Infinite Parallelism?

Abstract

Recent works have independently suggested that Quantum Mechanics might permit for procedures that transcend the power of Turing Machines as well as of `standard' Quantum Computers. These approaches rely on and indicate that Quantum Mechanics seems to support some infinite variant of classical parallel computing. We compare this new one with other attempts towards hypercomputation by separating 1) its principal computing capabilities from 2) realizability issues. The first are shown to coincide with recursive enumerability; the second are considered in analogy to `existence' in mathematical logic.