Robots again

On analog computers: I always feel like the odd man out when I talk about having actually worked with analog computers. In fact my farewall lecture at Rhodes College where I taught for 6 years was on the subject of analog computers. About 20 years ago, my first thoughts about AI were also along the lines of a "stored program analog computer." It's quite possible to imagine what such a concept might mean, but the difficulty is determining what purpose it would serve. Remember that an analog computer is basically a big differential equation solver. We can certainly design it in a way that when certain conditions are reached, we change the equations being solved, but how would we apply that to AI? Also the combination of analog and digital computer was fairly common and called a hybrid computer. EIA was one of the manufcaturers of such beasts. I still have fond memories of the 640/680 I used in college.