Analog computers are pretty awesome! Say you take a standard slide rule with two log scales, and want to do a division problem, x/y. There's more than one way

Analog computers are pretty awesome! Say you take a standard slide rule with two log scales, and want to do a division problem, x/y. There's more than one way to do it. I can think of at least 3. One of them won't just compute x/y for your particular x, but will compute x/y for ANY x. Accuracy is always the issue with analog stuff, but they sure are neat. Another fun one to contemplate is spaghetti sort. With an analog computer of sufficient resolution, you can sort n elements in O(n). You represent the numbers being sorted by lengths of spaghetti. Then you put them on the table straight up and bring a flat object down until it hits the first and largest piece of spaghetti. You set that down and repeat the process, selecting the largest element of the set every time. I've always liked the idea of hybrid systems. I envision one where you feed the analog part of your problem with a DAC, then get a really close answer up to the limit of your precision from the analog component, then pass that back out to an ADC and you have a very very close guess to feed into a digital algorithm to clean up the precision a bit. I bet you could absolutely fly through matrix multiplication that way. You could also take the analog output and adjust the scale so it's where it needs to be on the ambiguous parts, then feed it back into your analog computer again to refine your results.