Their "represent it as a matrix" approach reminded me of this Richard Feynman story: [...] Richard had completed his analysis of the behavior of the rout

Their "represent it as a matrix" approach reminded me of this Richard Feynman story: [...] Richard had completed his analysis of the behavior of the router, and much to our surprise and amusement, he presented his answer in the form of a set of partial differential equations. To a physicist this may seem natural, but to a computer designer, treating a set of boolean circuits as a continuous, differentiable system is a bit strange. Feynman's router equations were in terms of variables representing continuous quantities such as "the average number of 1 bits in a message address." I was much more accustomed to seeing analysis in terms of inductive proof and case analysis than taking the derivative of "the number of 1's" with respect to time. http://www.longnow.org/essays/richard-feynman-connection-machine/ http://www.longnow.org/essays/richard-feynman-connection-mac...