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The Origins and Nature of Computation

This research workshop takes place in Israel, so I doubt many of you will come, but the program is quite interesting so you might want to google some of the titles...

By Ehud Lamm at 2006-06-04 13:02 | General | other blogs | 5450 reads

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What is a computer?

One of my favorite issues is to point out that "modern" computing does not begin with programmable digital computer such as the IBM 360. Everything that these systems do today was being done in the 1940's, 50's and 60's by incredible, wired up masses of electronic components, typically consisting of many relays, analog computing elements such as operational amplifiers, servo driven potentiometer multipliers, as well as electro mechanical devices.

Why bring this up? Well it has to do with semantics of computing. A clear, more basic view of semantics may be gained by thinking of a system and its semantics in terms of wired up physical components. The transition from the wired-up stage to the fully programmed stage took many years and was quite difficult and I think we are still struggling with the issues.

By Hank Thediek at Sun, 2006-06-04 15:11 | login or register to post comments

did kripke really present a

did kripke really present a paper from 2000? i just googled for the title in the program and came up with this.

By andrew cooke at Wed, 2006-06-28 23:01 | login or register to post comments

It looks like it. By the

It looks like it.

By the way, I don't think his argument convinced the audience, though I personally found it rather original and entertaining.

By Ehud Lamm at Thu, 2006-06-29 20:11 | login or register to post comments