Earlier quoted context omitted.
My grad school professor was at a bar with a consultant friend who was trying to find the optimal wiring paths for routing expensive electric cables. My professor asked for the change in his pocket: they went to the hardware store and got plexiglass, dowel and drill. In the hotel room, the put together a model of the points to connect between the plexiglass sides and dunked it in the soapy hotel tub. the pattern the…
Okay, that makes sense to me—we can set up the physical system's initial conditions to mirror some problem we want solved, then let it do its thing and grab the solution back afterward. That definitely feels better justified than the view I had of it, though it still has some weakness, I think. From my understanding the justification for calling it computation comes down to: we can use the physical system to solve a…
Re: Burning Man's Mathematical Underbelly
#41It's an analog computer, just not a general purpose one. It solves one problem well.