The Unbelievable Zombie Comeback of Analog Computing

[FranTastic444]

Mainly for the benefit of Carl, here's an interesting article I came across recently.

[rode_kater]

That's pretty cool. I'm immediately reminded of the Diamond Age by Neal Stephenson, where devices are all 3D printed at a molecular scales, with physically moving pieces forming the actual computational units, all analog. So entire computers can be printed as motes of dust that can float through the air extracting energy from their environment to do work.

On the one hand I think it's probably impossible, but sometimes you read things that make you wonder.

[crfriend]

A resurgence of analogue computing does not surprise me one bit -- especially if it's reconfigurable on-the-fly. Analogue is a much better match to the Real World that quantised values where there's a gap between every step -- the the number of bits wrong and you have one heck of a problem!

I'm rather surprised that the young writer managed to somehow miss that problem in his estimation as to the "accuracy" of digital computers. And this "accuracy problem" is non-trivial when it comes to things like finance. There is a reason why commercial-grade computers calculate in decimal -- not binary -- values. Try expressing 0.10 in floating-point and have it come out properly. It never will because it's a repeater and you'd need an infinite amount of bits to completely eliminate the rounding error -- and it's amazing how many kiddies today are blissfully unaware of that and look down their noses at their elders with their decimal machines in the finance industry.

There's an old saying about computers -- "Garbage in, garbage out".

[Ozdelights]

There's an old saying about computers -- "Garbage in, garbage out".

Not just computers unfortunately.

[pelmut]

I never gave up on analogue computing, it makes much more sense in circumstances where the relationships between the parameters are unchanging and an approximate answer is needed immediately.  It is easy to twiddle an input and see what effect that has on the output without the delay of typing in numbers and interpreting the results.

[Grok]

If I recall correctly, there were a few electronic analog computers back during the 1950s. I imagine that an updated analog computer would be quite impressive compared to the old ones.

I recall a description of the Information Revolution of recent years. Technological revolution involving to basic areas, computation plus communications.

We have gotten familiar with digital electronic computers. With updated analog computers, this Information Revolution may well continue for some years.

[pelmut]

If I recall correctly, there were a few electronic analog computers back during the 1950s...

I used one on part of my Electrical Engineering course in 1969, it was a valve-based machine with 100v per M.U..

[For the benefit of those unfamiliar with analogue programming, the basic unit of computation is the Machine Unit (M.U.)]