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Re:High-speed microscope captures fleeting brain signals by arcticbull on Sunday March 29, 2020 @08:38PM (#22724151)
I'm not confident it's a direct comparison between the analog operations that happen in the brain and the digital integer or floating point operations of a CPU. For instance, a single 20-transistor operational amplifier can perform (analog) integration or differentiation. It takes way more CPU operations and operations per second to perform a real-time integration or differentiation -- and even that's a discrete approximation limited by the operating frequency (edit: not than an op-amp doesn't have its own frequency limitations of course).

Analog computers can perform dramatically more complex work, faster, and with a fraction of the resources -- at the cost of accuracy. The brain is able to consolidate and handle various analog processes to generate what we perceive as the "work product."

Re: 200Hz, it's unlikely the brain operates synchronously so it's unlikely to have an operating frequency of any rate let alone 200Hz. There are of course local systemic limitations such as the refresh rate of the eye. That's more the frequency defined by the "capacitive" capability of the retina.

A refresh rate in a digital system is global: the clock is the source of truth and great pains are taken to ensure clock skew (the difference in time between when the clock edge rises at one end of the wire vs the other) is within a tightly bounded range to ensure coherence of the overall system. An analog combinational computer would just do its work as the data arrives -- not at the rising or falling edge of some 200Hz signal subject to physiological limitations.

Re:High-speed microscope captures fleeting brain signals by leggomylibro on Sunday March 29, 2020 @09:54PM (#22724520)
Do you know of any good papers on analog computers?

They sound like interesting tools, especially since there are some sorts of problems where small amounts of unpredictable error can be helpful, like repetitive Monte Carlo-style simulations.

But it also seems like an intimidatingly large area to start learning about.

Re:High-speed microscope captures fleeting brain signals by hobs on Sunday March 29, 2020 @10:12PM (#22724587)
When in doubt, go back in time - they were the only option at one point.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MONIAC http://www.analogmuseum.org/english/introduction/

Re:High-speed microscope captures fleeting brain signals by ivanhoe on Monday March 30, 2020 @03:30AM (#22725931)
Search for e.g. "differential equations analog solvers"
Re:High-speed microscope captures fleeting brain signals by Reelin on Sunday March 29, 2020 @10:09PM (#22724573)
> A refresh rate in a digital system is global: the clock is the source of truth

I suspect you're already aware of this, but nonetheless - asynchronous digital logic (ie no clock) does exist! I've never had the chance to play with it though.

http://www.greenarraychips.com/

https://avlsi.csl.yale.edu/fpga.php

Re:High-speed microscope captures fleeting brain signals by arcticbull on Sunday March 29, 2020 @10:12PM (#22724586)
Definitely, also known as combinational logic (as compared to sequential logic). It's interesting stuff for sure, and I've wondered what a combinational CPU could look like. I should have said "in a synchronous digital system" so my bad. Frequency doesn't apply to combinational logic.

Digital systems are almost exclusively a pairing of combinational logic with digital "checkpointing" or pipelining.

With that in mind, in digital systems, as the clock speed increases the difference between combinational and sequential logic drops. Analog provides yet another layer of computational capability on top of that.