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Is analog computing reproducible? Digital computing is kind of founded on the idea that running the same program twice will give the same results (i.e. determin
by mehrdadn 8y ago
Is analog computing reproducible? Digital computing is kind of founded on the idea that running the same program twice will give the same results (i.e. determinism), but it seems to me that analog computing might simply fail to make that guarantee. Is that correct? And if so, have the implications and workarounds been investigated at all?
- jacobush 8y agoI expect within bounds... this already exists in floating point operations. Look up distributed games programming, x86, PPC etc for some meaty details, but the gist of it is to never trust the exact value, rather look for values within a suitable range. Interesting take though - with analog computing, this problem would be everywhere rather than in certain special cases. There probably is some funky math we can use to describe and talk about on HN in the year 2029?
- mehrdadn 8y agoThat it would be everywhere was exactly my point; I started listing all the sources of unpredictability in my comment but then I figured that wasn't necessary so I didn't go on that tangent. But yes, threading, floating point, RNGs, cache timing, etc. are all sources of randomness we deal with, but a computer where pretty much /any/ computation has to deal with randomness is a whole new ball game so far as I can tell.