3 ms·
If we define biomimetic so broadly that merely some vague inspiration from nature is enough, than I would say the Turing machine is also a biomimetic model. Aft
by tsimionescu 3y ago
If we define biomimetic so broadly that merely some vague inspiration from nature is enough, than I would say the Turing machine is also a biomimetic model. After all, Turing very explicitly modeled it after the activity of a mathematician working with a notebook. The read head represents the eyes of the mathematician scanning the notebook for symbols, the write head is their pencil, and the tape is the notebook itself.
Now, whether CPUs are an instance of a Turing machine or not is again quite debatable, but it's ultimately moot.
I think what matters more for deciding whether it makes sense to call a model biomimetic or not is whether it draws more than a passing inspiration from biology. Do practitioners keep referring back to biology to advance their design (not exclusively, but at least occasionally) or is it studied using other tools? Computers are obviously not biomimetic by this definition, as, beyond the original inspiration, no one has really looked at how mathematicians do their computations on paper to help build a better computer - the field evolved entirely detached from the model that inspired it.
With ANNs, admittedly, the situation is slightly murkier. The majority of advancements happen on mathematical grounds (e.g. choosing nonlinear activation functions to be able to approximate non-linear functions; various enhancements for faster or more stable floating point computations) or from broader computer science/engineering (faster GPUs, the single biggest factor in the advancement of the field).
However, there have been occasional forays back into biology, like the inspiration behind CNNs, and perhaps attention in Transformers. So, perhaps even by my own token, there is some (small) amount of biomimetic feedback in the design of ANNs.
- andoando 3y agoI love that you said this. >After all, Turing very explicitly modeled it after the activity of a mathematician working with a notebook. The read head represents the eyes of the mathematician scanning the notebook for symbols, the write head is their pencil, and the tape is the notebook itself. My feeling on this is complete opposite to yours. To me, this is completely valid mode of discovery, and possibly even what led to the thought of the Turing machine. We are after all, interested in mimicking/reproducing the we way think. So it's perfectly sensible that one would "think about how we think" to try and come up with a model of computation. I dont care at all about this argument of whether to call something biomemic or not. Thats just semantics. What you associate with meaning "biomemic" is subject to interpretation and one can only establish an objective criteria for it by asserting ones own mental model is the only correct one.
- tsimionescu 3y ago> My feeling on this is complete opposite to yours. To me, this is completely valid mode of discovery, and possibly even what led to the thought of the Turing machine. We are after all, interested in mimicking/reproducing the we way think. So it's perfectly sensible that one would "think about how we think" to try and come up with a model of computation. I'm not sure if you thought I was being sarcastic, but what I was describing there is literally how Turing came up with the idea, he describes this in the paper where he introduces the concept of computable numbers [0]. I just summarized the non-math bits of his paper. If you haven't read it, I highly recommend it, it's really easily digestible if you ignore the more mathematical parts. This particular argument appears in section 9. [0] https://www.cs.virginia.edu/~robins/Turing_Paper_1936.pdf https://www.cs.virginia.edu/~robins/Turing_Paper_1936.pdf