Fire All Neurons!

Analog computing? I hadn’t really thought about that one …

Well, in the beginning, it was quite superior to classical computing, because it was so much faster

Faster? 🤨

Yep, it could make quite complex calculations: a century ago analog computers for fire control on battleships solved differential equations in real time 😊                                                            

The who with the what now?! 😄

I don’t mean to go as far back as ancient Greece, but at the beginning of the 20th century shooting the big guns on a ship accurately required a lot of calculations, in real-time (Gears of war: When mechanical analog computers ruled the waves)

I had no idea about this … 🤔

Just like you don’t fall over when you play tennis, because your neural system integrates information about your limbs and the balance organ in your inner ear

ships used gyroscopes and analogue computers to keep their guns on target despite rolling with the waves

Wow, that certainly would involve quite a lot of computation I guess

It does! Analog computing does this in a very different way from digital computing, but that doesn’t mean it’s not computing …

Ok, ok, fine! So these analog computers work more or less like the inner ear, therefore we might as well call it neuromorphic computing?

I’m sure some people might disagree, but basically, yes. You’d have to ask Cho about the specifics of how the brain does stuff like that though

I must say, this isn’t really what we were looking for originally …

I guess this kind of measuring, integrating information, and reacting in real-time is a lot less sexy than finding faces in photos and animating them …

Maybe it’s that, but I also suppose that most people wouldn’t consider this as computation at all

I’d say that someone skateboarding is solving a lot of differential equations in real-time! Or they’d crack their skulls … 😅

Just playing devil’s advocate here 😄

Just because we can describe the system using equations, doesn’t mean that the system is computing anything …?

Ah, yeah, I can see where that is coming from .. 😊                  sunflowers don’t do astronomy just by following the sun

That’s it, yes! So what are these navy devices and the inner ear doing exactly that makes them “computers”?

I had a whole conversation with Julia about analog vs digital, I guess this is the same kind of problem right here