The Robust Mapping Account of Implementation

According to the robust mapping account we propose, a mapping from physical to computational states is a legitimate basis for implementation only if it includes only physical states relevant to the computation, the physical states have enough spatiotemporal structure to map onto the structure of the computational states, and the evolving physical states bear neither more nor less information about the evolving computation than do the computational states they map onto. When these conditions are in place, a physical system can be said to implement a computation in a robust sense, which does not trivialize the notion of implementation.