The analogy of a market as a computational process that churns out prices and quantities is a recurring theme in economics [1]. For the most part this is a conceptual analogy without precise definitions of the micro-economic processes that are doing the computational work or what the relationship is to computational complexity, the field in which the theoretical limits of computation are studied. Without this connection these analogies lack sufficient substance to provide a useful foundation for a computational economics that makes use of simulations. Here we consider the computational aspects of game theory where both game structure and agent strategies are identified with Boolean logic gates. We then make precise the analogy between micro-economic processes and a formal definition of an economy carrying out a computational process. This allows us to explore the formal limits of computational models of an economy and the achievability of computing equilibrium states [2] by using the outputs (computers) of an economy.
