Quotes About Computation

The nervous system and the automatic machine are fundamentally alike in that they are devices, which make decisions on the basis of decisions they made in the past.

The question is, can we make neural networks that are 1,000 times bigger? And how can we do that with existing computation?

There is scarcely a subject that cannot be mathematically treated and the effects calculated or the results determined beforehand from the available theoretical and practical data.

Amicable numbers are two different numbers related in the sense that when you add all their proper divisors together—not including the original number itself—the sums of their divisors equal each other. The numbers—esteemed by mathematicians—are considered amicable because the proper divisors of 220 are 1, 2, 4, 5, 10, 11, 20, 22, 44, 55 and 110 which, when added together, reach 284. And the proper divisors of 284 are 1, 2, 4, 71 and 142, of which the sum is 220.

The whole of arithmetic now appeared within the grasp of mechanism.

Arithmetic is numbers you squeeze from your head to your hand to your pencil to your paper till you get the answer.

Durham said, "Do you know what a Garden-of-Eden configuration is?" Maria was caught blank for a second, then she said, "Yes, of course. In cellular automaton theory, it's a state of the system that can't be the result of any previous state. No other pattern of cells can give rise to it. If you want a Garden-of-Eden configuration, you have to start with it – you have to put it in by hand as the system's first state.

But what is intelligence? Is intelligence calculations and computations? Or must true intelligence contain a moral component? Each passing minute, I believe more that this is the case.

In PM, as Gödel said, "one can prove any theorem using nothing but a few mechanical rules.

logarithmic tables as cheap as potatoes"—

Where Bith intelligence was grounded in mathematics and computation, Muun intelligence was driven by a will to profit.

In this metaphor we actually have a picture of the computational universe, a metaphor which I hope to make scientifically precise as part of a research program.

One of the things that I've been doing recently in my scientific research is to ask this question: Is the universe actually capable of performing things like digital computations?

If you've never programmed a computer, you should. There's nothing like it in the whole world. When you program a computer, it does exactly what you tell it to do. It's like designing a machine — any machine, like a car, like a faucet, like a gas-hinge for a door — using math and instructions. It's awesome in the truest sense: it can fill you with awe.

A number is random if the simplest way to express it is by writing it down.

Google, playing off googol, the term for the number 1 followed by a hundred zeros.

The method you use is something called the base two logarithm. The logarithm is the opposite of the power. We know that 2 to the 7th power equals 128. The base two logarithm of 128 equals 7.

I said early on in this chapter that we would need 144 relays for our adding machine. Here's how I figured that out: Each

We don't carry in subtraction, however; we borrow, and that involves an intrinsically different mechanism—a messy back-and-forth kind of thing.

Bits also play a part in logic, that strange blend of philosophy and mathematics for which a primary goal is to determine whether certain statements are true or false. True

Thus, 1 is actually a function with the two bound variables f and x. Just offhand, those two variables seem like two more variables than are needed to define a simple number.

Any feature of the world at a future time can be computed from the configuration of the present. That is, the passage of time can be replaced by a computation, which means that the future is logically a consequence of the present.

Ultimately, thinking is a very inefficient method of processing data.

The idea behind digital computers may be explained by saying that these machines are intended to carry out any operations which could be done by a human computer.