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SIMON_SAYS_MORE

                                             January 31, 2022

                 Continuing on from

                         ARTIFICIAL_SIMON


Bits and pieces that could be set in places over
there or moved elsewhere, or cut entirely...






p.17-18

    "... almost no interesting statement that one can
    make about an operating computer bears any
    particular relation to the specific nature of the
    hardware. A computer is an organization of
    elementary functional components in which, to a
    high approximation, only the function
    performed by those components is relevant to the
    behavior of the whole system."

          So, is he arguing that we often care
          about the interconnection and arrangement
          of large numbers of components, without
          caring so much about precisely what the
          components are?


    "This highly abstractive quality of
    computers makes it easy to introduce      That's certainly a good point--
    mathematics into the study of their       for example, it's been
    theory and has led some to the            understood for some time now,
    erroneous conclusion that, as a           that you need to actually
    computer science emerges, it will         examine running code to find out
    necessarily be a mathematical rather      where the bottlenecks in the
    than an empirical science."               system are.

                                              Experience shows that no
                                              theoretical understanding is
                                              ever good enough to let us get
                                              by without testing:
                                              trial-and-error rules.




p19

    "The important point for our present discussion is that
    the parts could as well be neurons as relays, as well
    relays as transistors. The natural laws governing relays
    are very well known, while the natural laws governing
    neurons are known most imperfectly. But that does not
    matter, for all that is relevant for the theory is that
    the components have the specified level of unreliability
    and be interconnected in the specified way."

    "This example shows that the possibility of building a
    mathematical theory of a system or of simulating that
    system does not depend on having an adequate micro theory
    of the natural laws that govern the system
    components. Such a micro theory might indeed be simply
    irrelevant."









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