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I think back in the day analog computers were never really programmable. At most you could tweak some knobs to change weights on embodied differential equations etc.
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I guess I’m not phrasing the question well. I’m not talking about 1940s vintage vannevar bush style analog computing but a possible modern descendant capable of fairly general computation with real numbers and infinite precision (Shannon noise-limited) hardware.
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For information processing, even biology tends to handle only quantized info. First thing your eyes do with light is convert it into "sensor on / off" at the optic nerve, transmitting discrete binary signals. It's not clear an analog computer is even possible, theoretically.
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I've never seen anyone put forward a proof either way tho...maybe there's some way to build a computer that manipulates info without representing it as bits (as in quantized states)...but I've never see one. Would be an interesting math project.
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