41–50 of 107 posts
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Read unlimited as arbitrary precision. I'm familiar with the Turing thesis but he's wrong.
> I'm familiar with the Turing thesis but he's wrong. You're going to have to back up a statement like that with a whole lot of supporting evidence if you want to be taken seriously.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Read unlimited as arbitrary precision. I'm familiar with the Turing thesis but he's wrong.
> I'm familiar with the Turing thesis but he's wrong. You're going to have to back up a statement like that with a whole lot of supporting evidence if you want to be taken seriously.
A good summary of analog computers can be found on the wikipedia article: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Analog_computer Takeaway: Analog computers are limited in precision and by "analog noise"; the precision of the components used determine the precision of the output. Usually no more than 3 or 4 decimal places are possible, at least with the tech that was used in their heydey. I would say that is still close to the…
>The human brain is a great example – its processing power is estimated at about 38 petaflops, about two-fifths of that of TaihuLight. Huh? So we now have computers more powerful than the human brain? I thought that was still some decades off. And how would one even measure such a thing? In the apples-to-apples comparison, a stupid human trick floating-point calculation savant might manage 1 flop/s.
I find it amusing that there is much hype about computer systems beating humans in very specialised areas, such as go and chess.
But the missing piece here is that the human is still doing this while continuously processing all the sensory input that is occurring to that human, dealing with so much more than what the computer system is dealing with. The computer system is dealing with one and only one subject matter at a speed many magnitudes faster and is only just getting ahead.
That's why digital computers have so far been so much more successful than analog computers. While analog computers may have the potential to be "better", they'd require massive global hardware and software changes to become the next big thing. People are lazy, and there's no way they'd want to port everything over to a completely different paradigm just for better energy efficiency and speed.
I'm hoping that analog computing will come back in the form of photonic analog computing. This would be more powerful than quantum digital computing (you know the things that people are wasting time on). Fun fact, with analog computing, one could imagine achieving Real Computation ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Real_computation ) which is above and beyond Turing. completeness. Note the fun sentence "If real computat…
What you're describing is generally accepted to be physically unrealizable. In fact, the sentence that follows your quoted sentence cites two commonly known physical limitations that prevent the existence of your "computational class above and beyond Turing". Whether or not there exist physically realizable computations that are not computable by a turing machine is an open question, but most physicists and computati…
what does it mean?
Earlier quoted context omitted.
What you're describing is generally accepted to be physically unrealizable. In fact, the sentence that follows your quoted sentence cites two commonly known physical limitations that prevent the existence of your "computational class above and beyond Turing". Whether or not there exist physically realizable computations that are not computable by a turing machine is an open question, but most physicists and computati…
Read unlimited as arbitrary precision. I'm familiar with the Turing thesis but he's wrong.