Analog Computing Puns

I was thinking about this because I saw the headline World’s Largest Chip Maker to Raise Prices, Threatening Costlier Electronics, and of course we’ve been discussing it on the sub for a while. I’m not really sure what the ramifications are for something like:

> TSMC to increase prices of most advanced chips by roughly 10%; less advanced chips will cost about 20% more

> The price increases come in the wake of a global semiconductor shortage that has affected Apple and most car makers, including General Motors Co. and Toyota Motor Corp. In August, GM said it had to idle three factories in North America that make large pickup trucks, the company’s biggest moneymaker. Last week, Toyota said it would curb production by 40% in September.

I was looking at the Dreyer Table, and it got me thinking if it was possible that modern mechanical computing could do some of the work of chips. My thought is that materials are better and more lightweight and machining finer and more precise, so these wouldn’t have to be giant brass and iron devices with massive gears.

So, if there is anybody here who can explain how mechanical computing works, or what tasks might be done by them instead of chips, I’d appreciate it.

> It is not possible to study the Dreyer tables without developing a familiarity with the ship-wide art of fire control, the process of calculation and articulation by which the shells can be made to rapidly and continually fall in a pattern around a distant maneuvering enemy. The Dreyer's role was akin to that of a CPU within a modern computer system, and its "socket" was the TS. Examining a dreadnought as a computer system is the best way to develop this understanding. Just as a CPU processes input received via keyboard, mouse, and network adapter, the Dreyer table was given data on what the enemy appeared to be doing. And, just as a CPU might generate output on a screen or printer, the Dreyer's output peripherals were powerful naval guns. Without paying too much attention to the input and output devices, let's examine the TS's role in the system by drawing a circle around it and observing which inputs and outputs crossed this membrane.

Lol if you think you’d be able to develop one for the Canadian Military by say

Abstract

Analog photonic solutions offer unique opportunities to address complex computational tasks with unprecedented performance in terms of energy dissipation and speeds, overcoming current limitations of modern computing architectures based on electron flows and digital approaches. The lack of modularization and lumped element reconfigurability in photonics has prevented the transition to an all-optical analog computing platform. Here, we explore, using numerical simulation, a nanophotonic platform based on epsilon-near-zero materials capable of solving in the analog domain partial differential equations (PDE). Wavelength stretching in zero-index media enables highly nonlocal interactions within the board based on the conduction of electric displacement, which can be monitored to extract the solution of a broad class of PDE problems. By exploiting the experimentally achieved control of deposition technique through process parameters, used in our simulations, we demonstrate the possibility of implementing the proposed nano-optic processor using CMOS-compatible indium-tin-oxide, whose optical properties can be tuned by carrier injection to obtain programmability at high speeds and low energy requirements. Our nano-optical analog processor can be integrated at chip-scale, processing arbitrary inputs at the speed of light.

There's more to the article. I'd check it out if you're interested.

Copied from nature.com

Has there ever been any research into solving nasty applied problems by using the universe as a simulator?

Like, suppose I work in finance, and I have to estimate a horribly intractable diffusion problem, or whatever, and the computing time required to obtain a good estimator will be infeasible. But also, suppose that there’s a chemistry setup I can observe, whose behavior will theoretically be governed by the diffusion problem I’m trying to solve. Surely, then, I can obtain solutions to my original problem just by observing the outcomes of the chemistry setup?

As a motivating example, much of my graduate work was in Markov chain mixing times, which are notoriously hard to bound. But maybe I could just find some physical analog, and extract estimators by watching that process?

Yesterday i did an initial design for an analog circuit who's purpose it is to simulate an Lottka-Voltera model and compare it to a reference Lottka-Voltera signal and calculate the integrated square error and also calculate the gradient of the 4 parameters so one could use a digital computer to tweak the parameters using gradients to fit the Lottka-Voltera model against the reference signal. It is here: https://tinyurl.com/hvat4s52

What do you think of the circuit? (I haven't tested it yet but i am looking for feedback for my design sense)

What problems should i look out for when implementing it?

Can you recommend any software for drawing up such circuits?

With transistors reaching their physical size limit, it seems like there needs to be some major paradigm shifts to continue improving the processing power. One possible improvement would be to create analog circuits instead of digital one's.

I could see analog circuits having a key role in tasks related to neural networks and the kind, since the precision limitation doesn't really matter there.

It might also be applicable in biotech since human neurons are analog.

Do you think analog computing might make a resurgence in some way, or will the computers of the future all be digital?

 

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