19 Nov
2003
19 Nov
'03
2:17 p.m.
On Wed, 19 Nov 2003, William R. Buckley wrote:
Moreover, there is the _analog computer_ with
programming very
similar to the unit record equipment, and such machines have always
been known as computers.
Hardly. That's like saying French and Spanish are the same language
because they share a common character set. They are computers in a wholly
different sense of the word and have nothing at all to do with a Turing
Machine, and thereby this discussion has suddenly drifted off into bizarre
and meaningless abstracts.
The important point for computation is closure, and
Turing is the
ideal model. It is not efficient, it is not pretty but, all systems that
exhibit computational closure are Turing machine equivalents, and
this is the foundation of computer science.
Including analog computers and unit record equipment?
--
Sellam Ismail Vintage Computer Festival
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