@thomasweibel @johncarlosbaez I guess anyone interested in analog mechanical computers knows Titiana Van Vark... If not, see: https://www.tatjavanvark.nl/

I don't know the validity of her works on the Antikythera Mechanism, though. I'm most subjugated by her Fourier series machines.

#AnalogComputing

@giacomoi @albertcardona @RuthMalan

I am hoping to see lots more practical developments along the lines of: This physical phenomenon does something (by virtue of being itself) that is isomorphic to some computation. How do we couple it to the environment so that the naturally occurring computation corresponds to something we care about?

To be honest, I am a little surprised that there haven't been more attempts at modern analog computers. This paper by Jaeger et al gives some clue as to the potential for extracting computational services from physic: http://arxiv.org/abs/2307.15408

I suspect that one contributor to the lack of progress on modern analog computing is the difficulty of mapping from the user's problem of interest to the computation offered by the physical substrate. In the AOC case you need to map the user's problem to a fix-point problem (because that's all the hardware can solve). This paper by Kleyko et al deals with that issue by proposing that Vector Symbolic Architectures could be used as an intermediate abstraction between the user's problem and a wide range of nonstandard computational hardware: http://arxiv.org/abs/2106.05268

#neuromorphic #AnalogComputing #VectorSymbolicArchitectures #VSA #HyperdimensionalComputing #HDC