4 ms·

This is a very interesting way of thinking about computation - do you have any sources you recommend?

• causality0 4y ago
  His explanation is kind of the high-fidelity version of the first day of digital electronics class. Digital computation relies on voltage levels that are high or low. The voltage level of the output of a step is not directly related to the voltage of the input, just whether that voltage falls in the low range or the high range. This fact prevents inexact voltage from compounding over time. Maybe you're using 3.3v logic; one step's input could be 3.2v and that would still be a high, and the output, if high, might be 3.5v. Non-digital systems don't inherently have that constant resetting of levels back to discrete values like digital systems do.
• ouid 4y ago
  I had a lot of finals, and the answer to this comment that I did not write was essentially accurate. The people who think about computers this way are the people who have to implement them on analog devices, aka the electrical engineers. There is a discrete analog (lol) in the form of coding theory, since it often more practical to make a slightly noisy discrete space and then perform discrete error correction. I was looking at your other comments to see how I should answer you, and I gathered that I can just link you papers. I imagine Von neumann and Hamming and shannon all have something to say about this topic, but since we're talking about quantum computing, I believe the relevant work can be found in these, and their references. https://arxiv.org/abs/quant-ph/9705052 https://arxiv.org/abs/quant-ph/9705052 https://arxiv.org/abs/quant-ph/0403025 https://arxiv.org/abs/quant-ph/0403025 I'll check back on this thread if you have questions. If I had all of the answers to my own questions though, I would be famous.