Using analog computers in today's largest computational challenges

Grounding Analog Computers

1.0 Is Cognition Discrete or Continuous? 1.1 Although I hate to haggle over words, Harnad's use ofànalog' confuses a number of issues. The problem begins with the phrasèanalog world' in the title, which does not correspond to any technical or nontechnical usage ofànalog' with which I'm familiar. Although I don't know precisely what he means byànalog', it is clearly related to the distinction be...

Metric Relations among Analog Computers

Brains as analog-model computers

Computational neuroscientists not only employ computer models and simulations in studying brain functions. They also view the modeled nervous system itself as computing. What does it mean to say that the brain computes? And what is the utility of the ‘brain-as-computer’ assumption in studying brain functions? In previous work, I have argued that a structural conception of computation is not ade...

Denial of Service Attack Detection using Extended Analog Computers

Denial of Service (DoS) attacks, a damaging assault on computer networking infrastructure, have been extensively examined by the digital computing community. However, no work has been done to examine the ability of Extended Analog Computers (EAC) to detect DoS attacks. In this paper, we discuss how EACs could be used in DoS detection.

Iteration, Inequalities, and Differentiability in Analog Computers

Shannon's General Purpose Analog Computer (GPAC) is an elegant model of analog computation in continuous time. In this paper, we consider whether the set G of GPAC-computable functions is closed under iteration, that is, whether for any function f(x) 2 G there is a function F (x; t) 2 G such that F (x; t) = f (x) for non-negative integers t. We show that G is not closed under iteration, but a s...