Computers Blog April Archive

The death of Artifical Intelligence

According to WikiPedia, An analog computer (spelled analogue in British English) is a form of computer that uses electrical, mechanical or hydraulic phenomena to model the problem being solved. More generally an analog computer uses one kind of physical quantity to represent the behaviour of another physical system, or mathematical function.

In general, analog computers are limited by real, non-ideal effects. An analog signal is composed of four basic components: DC and AC magnitudes, frequency, and phase. The real limits of range on these characteristics limit analog computers. Some of these limits include the noise floor, non-linearities, temperature coefficient, and parasitic effects within semiconductor devices, and the finite charge of an electron. Incidentally, for commercially available electronic components, ranges of these aspects of input and output signals are always figures of merit. [wikipedia]

What they fail to mention here is that the last dated reference in their article about Analog Computers has a date of "1960"!

Analog computers, however, have been replaced by digital computers for almost all uses. It may be stretching a point to regard some physical simulations such as wind tunnels as analog computers, because the data so obtained must then also be scaled, for example, for Reynolds number and Mach number. There is a point of view in physics based on information processing which attempts to map the physical processes to computations. Thus, from these points of view, the wind tunnel data gathering is either an experiment or a computation. [wikipedia]

Now comes my theory. I believe it was not long after 1960 that the Analog system was generally discarded for a preference to the Digital system. Forty some years later, the Digital computers are tremendously more advanced and powerful than what was found in 1960, or even 5 or 10 years ago.

Now what has this to do with Artificial Intelligence? Everything!

Digital computers are extremely good at exactly one thing, 0's and 1's. Everything is exactly precise. Attemping to do imprecise operations is extremely difficult.

Now what exactly is intelligence? It is the opposite of precision. It is impression. It is everything between the 0 and the 1.

The decision to abandon the analog computer was the death of artificial intelligence. Just think what 40+ years of heavy duty development of analogy computers could have accomplished. Not a memory chip that stores a gigabyte of 0s and 1s, but a chip that stores a gigabyte of bits that each hold an infinite variable between 0 and 1.