Re:Bipolar-Zener Combo Takes On CMOS
by emmelaich on Tuesday October 22, 2019 @05:18PM
(#21328589)
Analogue processing has certainly been successful for people, so I wouldn't be too dismissive.
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I would not be certain of the premise in your statement. We do not understand the brain well enough to say whether error correction (which is inherently digital) is utilized. There are some pretty solid clues that some of the processing in the brain is not analog (e.g. the step-like behavior of the activation function of biological neurons).
And coming from the other side: If it turns out that the brain is actually an analog computer without anything that can be rephrased as some form of sloppy noisy approximately-digital error correction, this would be incredibly important discovery, completely changing our understanding of theoretical computer science and complexity theory. P-vs-NP or the eventual creation of quantum computers would pale in comparison to the impact of discovering scalable analog computers.
Agree mostly, except for "error correction .. inherently digital"
For an example of an analogue error corrector, see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Centrifugal_governor
PS. cool fact; "governor" has the same etymology as kubernetes.