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Using Biased Coins as Oracles
Toby Ord and Tien D. Kieu

While it is well known that a Turing machine equipped with the ability to flip a fair coin cannot compute more than a standard Turing machine, we show that this is not true for a biased coin. Indeed, any oracle set X may be coded as a probability pX such that if a Turing machine is given a coin which lands heads with probability pX it can compute any function recursive in X with arbitrarily high probability. We also show how the assumption of a non-recursive bias can be weakened by using a sequence of increasingly accurate recursive biases or by choosing the bias at random from a distribution with a non-recursive mean. We conclude by briefly mentioning some implications regarding the physical realisability of such methods.

Keywords: Probabilistic Turing machine, hypercomputation, oracle, qubit.

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