>>If you believe Turing, there's nothing an analog computer can comput
>>a digital one can't. A brain is many things: it's wet, it's analog,
>>it's massively parallel. I don't think anybody believes that it's w
>>or analogness that matters, but clearly a high degree of parallel
>>processing seems important to solving perception problems quickly.
This
>>is the basic inspiration that drove Danny Hillis to create the Conne
>>Machine, with 64,000 simple processors working in parallel.
>Perhaps incredibly, Turing _did_ believe that there was something
>special about the brain (in particular he could/would not rule out ES
>and so I don't think he would ever have claimed that a Turing Machine
>could do anything that a human brain could. The TM was designed to
>solve a specific problem in mathematical theory, rather than as a
>theoretical ultimate brain.
>
>But now you've got me trying to think of something that an analog(ue)
>computer can do that a digital one can't. Reversibility might be one
>thing. I guess it's reasonable to argue that digital computers are a
>subset of analogue computers, as transistors are analogue.
>
>I'm going to stop thinking about this before I recurse.
a)If you think about it, a neuron in the brain is very much like an
AND gate or a transistor. It has multiple inputs and needs a certain
amount of electricty across them for its single output to go high.
b)I heard that people are working on computers with transistors so
small, they would be affected by quantum laws, and thus be analog
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Received on Mon Mar 16 1998 - 14:58:25 GMT