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> Analog computers were just digital computers with a different computational paradigm. No, there are fundamental differences. Digital computation is inherentl
by klmr 8y ago
> Analog computers were just digital computers with a different computational paradigm.
No, there are fundamental differences. Digital computation is inherently error correcting because there are only two states — on or off. With analog computing, errors compound over long times and there’s fundamentally no way to fix this (it’s not just “hard”, it’s theoretically impossible). That’s why analog computation is fundamentally limited in scale, it can’t handle complexity through abstraction. Modern computer science is fundamentally tied to digital computation. This is also why evolution relies on a digital (albeit not binary) storage medium (DNA), and if we every have useful biological computation, it will likewise be digital.
- jerf 8y agoThis is another case of "cutting off my quote too early". Compared to the difference between what biological computation and digital computation is going to look like, what we call analog and digital computers are brothers, because they share the same basic IO. ("No, they have differences..." Yes, they do... but compare to biology. A valid input to a biological computation process will be your physical body. Not some numeric representation of it, but the actual thing. This is inconceivably foreign to either the modern digital computer paradigm or anything we've ever called an analog computer. By comparison, whether someone is typing "17.213" onto a screen or setting a dial somewhere vaguely in the region of 17 is a minor detail!) Biological computation won't be digital. It'll have digital components, but it will neither be intrinsically digital the way current computing is as it will inevitably be operating in an analog domain, nor will it resemble our current computing paradigms.