19 Nov
2003
19 Nov
'03
2:50 p.m.
Sellam:
Both systems, analog computers and unit record equipment use plug boards
for programming. It may even be that the plug board as a physical item does
not exist, in which case the analog computer is programmed by a means of
wires hanging all about. For both cases, the mechanism of programming is
identical. The point is the means of programming.
Yes, from a mathematical point of view, computational closure is there,
in stored program computers, analog computers, and the processes of
using unit record equipment.
William R. Buckley
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?