111–120 of 209 posts
Pretty much all USB chips have a fully programmable CPU when you go into the data sheets. It feels silly for simple hid or charging devices but basic microcontrollers are cheap and actually save costs compared to asics.
Yeesh. Beware the random wall wart I guess.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
only in the same sense that a machinist's micrometer, an optical telescope, an analog television set, an acoustic guitar, a letterpress printing press, a car's manual transmission, a fountain pen, a nomogram, and a transistor also 'compute an output from given inputs' do you want to call them all 'computers' now?
What's wrong with that? They are. We can always make the finer distinction of "Von Neumann architecture inspired digital electronic computer" if you wish to exclude the examples you've given. After all, anything which transforms a particular input to a particular output in a consistent fashion could be considered a computer which implements a particular function. I would say - don't confuse the word's meaning with th…
By analogy to HCI: words are affordances. Affordances exist because of familiarity. Don’t make a doorknob that you push on, and expect people not to write in telling you to use a door-bar on that door instead.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
only in the same sense that a machinist's micrometer, an optical telescope, an analog television set, an acoustic guitar, a letterpress printing press, a car's manual transmission, a fountain pen, a nomogram, and a transistor also 'compute an output from given inputs' do you want to call them all 'computers' now?
What's wrong with that? They are. We can always make the finer distinction of "Von Neumann architecture inspired digital electronic computer" if you wish to exclude the examples you've given. After all, anything which transforms a particular input to a particular output in a consistent fashion could be considered a computer which implements a particular function. I would say - don't confuse the word's meaning with th…
Unilaterally changing language is not forbidden, but if The Culture Wars™ has thought us anything, it is that people are allergic to talking about what they see as mandated changes to their language, even if it is reasonable and you can explain it.
Colour me stoked, but you could still just do it unilaterally and wait till somebody notices.
However my caveat with viewing everything as computation is that you fall into the same trap as people in the ~1850s did when they wanted to describe everything in the world using complex mechanical devices, because that was the bleeding edge back then. Not everything is an intricate system of pulleys and levers it turned out, even if theoretically you could mimic everything if that system was just complex enough.
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You can: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/General_purpose_analog_compute... There is still active research in the area, eg. https://www.lix.polytechnique.fr/~bournez/i.php?n=Main.Publi...
a universal turing machine is a particular machine which can simulate all other turing machines. the gpac, by contrast, is a family of machines: all machines built out of such-and-such a set of parts you can't simulate an 11-integrator general-purpose analog computer or other differential analyzer with a 10-integrator differential analyzer, and you can't simulate a differential analyzer with 0.1% error on a (more typ…
> Apollo 11 spacecraft contains 4 computers Analog computers don't get the respect they deserve. There's one more computer, the FCC. The Flight Control Computer is an analog computer in the Saturn V that controlled the rocket gimbals. It's a two-foot cylinder weighing almost 100 pounds.
You forgot the most important one, the human computers at ground control. Who said women can't do math? https://www.smithsonianmag.com/science-nature/history-human-...
Asimov.
https://literature.stackexchange.com/questions/25852/where-d...
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You forgot the most important one, the human computers at ground control. Who said women can't do math? https://www.smithsonianmag.com/science-nature/history-human-...
> Who said women can't do math? Nobody
https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-524390/The-women-ad...
Granted, that same search will show you many examples of content accusing unnamed other people of having this attitude.
https://www.science.org/content/article/both-genders-think-w...
It’s an antiquated notion in my mind, but I don’t think it is a thing of the past.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
You can: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/General_purpose_analog_compute... There is still active research in the area, eg. https://www.lix.polytechnique.fr/~bournez/i.php?n=Main.Publi...
a universal turing machine is a particular machine which can simulate all other turing machines. the gpac, by contrast, is a family of machines: all machines built out of such-and-such a set of parts you can't simulate an 11-integrator general-purpose analog computer or other differential analyzer with a 10-integrator differential analyzer, and you can't simulate a differential analyzer with 0.1% error on a (more typ…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
a universal turing machine is a particular machine which can simulate all other turing machines. the gpac, by contrast, is a family of machines: all machines built out of such-and-such a set of parts you can't simulate an 11-integrator general-purpose analog computer or other differential analyzer with a 10-integrator differential analyzer, and you can't simulate a differential analyzer with 0.1% error on a (more typ…
Sure, you cannot easily simulate another analog computer, but this is not the requirement. The requirement is turing completeness, which can be done.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
only in the same sense that a machinist's micrometer, an optical telescope, an analog television set, an acoustic guitar, a letterpress printing press, a car's manual transmission, a fountain pen, a nomogram, and a transistor also 'compute an output from given inputs' do you want to call them all 'computers' now?
The arithmetic circuits alone, like adders, multipliers etc., regardless if they are mechanical or electronic, analog or digital, should not be called computers. When the arithmetic circuits, i.e. the "central arithmetical part", as called by von Neumann, are coupled with a "central control part", as called by von Neumann, i.e. with a sequencer that is connected in a feedback loop with the arithmetic part, so that th…
you can even include multiplexors in your analog 'computer', even with only adders and multipliers and constants; x · (1 + -1 · y) + z · y interpolates between x and z under the control of y, so that its output is conditionally either x or z (or some intermediate state). but once you start including feedback to push y out of that intermediate zone, you've built a flip-flop, and you're well on your way to building a digital control unit (one you could probably build more easily out of transistors rather than op-amps). and surely before long you can call it a digital computer, though one that is controlling precision linear analog circuitry
it is very commonly the case that analog computation is much, much faster than digital computation; even today, with microprocessors a hundred thousand times faster than an 8080 and fpgas that are faster still, if you're doing submillimeter computation you're going to have to do your front-end filtering, upconversion or downconversion, and probably even detection in the analog domain
> Apollo 11 spacecraft contains 4 computers Analog computers don't get the respect they deserve. There's one more computer, the FCC. The Flight Control Computer is an analog computer in the Saturn V that controlled the rocket gimbals. It's a two-foot cylinder weighing almost 100 pounds.
i think it's (unintentionally) misleading to describe analog 'computers' as 'computers'. what distinguishes digital computers from other digital hardware is that they're turing-complete (if given access to enough memory), and there isn't any similar notion in the analog domain the only reason they have the same name is that they were both originally built to replace people cranking out calculations on mechanical desk…
ENIAC, for example, was not a stored-program computer. Reprogramming required rewiring the machine.
On the other hand, by clever use of arithmetic calculations, https://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/summary?doi=10.1.1.37.... says the Z3 could perform as a Universal Computer, even though, quoting its Wikipedia page, "because it lacked conditional branching, the Z3 only meets this definition by speculatively computing all possible outcomes of a calculation."
Which makes me think the old punched card mechanical tabulators could also be rigged up as a universal machine, were someone clever enough.
"Surprisingly Turing-Complete" or "Accidentally Turing Complete" is a thing, after all, and https://gwern.net/turing-complete includes a bunch of them.