Читать книгу Computation in Science (Second Edition) - Konrad Hinsen - Страница 16

What I have discussed above, and what I will discuss in the rest of this book, is computation in the tradition of arithmetic and Boolean logic, automated by digital computers. There is, however, a very different approach to tackling some of the same problems, which is known as analog computing. Its basic idea is to construct systems whose behavior is governed by the mathematical relations one wishes to explore, and then perform experiments on these systems. The simplest analog computer is the slide rule, which was a common tool to perform multiplication and division (plus a few more complex operations) before the general availability of electronic calculators.

Today, analog computers have almost disappeared from scientific research, because digital computers perform most tasks better and at a much lower cost. This is also the reason why this book’s focus is on digital computing. However, analog computing is still used for some specialized applications. More importantly, the idea of computation as a form of experiment has persisted in the scientific community. Whereas I consider it inappropriate in the context of software-controlled digital computers, as I will explain in section 5.1, it is a useful point of view to adopt in looking at emerging alternative computing techniques, such as artificial neural networks.