<story><title>Computing 10,000X more efficiently (2010) [pdf]</title><url>http://web.media.mit.edu/~bates/Summary_files/BatesTalk.pdf</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>ced</author><text>Off-topic: if an integral is an approximation of a physical process, then that process is an approximation of the integral. I.e. we could in principle have a &amp;quot;chip&amp;quot; running a miniature lab experiment (like water flowing) with sensors that would output &amp;quot;an approximate solution of the Navier-Stokes equations&amp;quot;. Numerical analysts would then write new versions of their algorithms assuming &amp;quot;an efficient hardware solution of N-S&amp;quot;. Has this concept ever been used anywhere? I guess quantum computing would qualify.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>hcarvalhoalves</author><text>&amp;gt; I.e. we could in principle have a &amp;quot;chip&amp;quot; running a miniature lab experiment (like water flowing)&lt;p&gt;It looks like this is a thing:&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fluidics&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;http:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&amp;#x2F;wiki&amp;#x2F;Fluidics&lt;/a&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Water_integrator&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;http:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&amp;#x2F;wiki&amp;#x2F;Water_integrator&lt;/a&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MONIAC_Computer&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;http:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&amp;#x2F;wiki&amp;#x2F;MONIAC_Computer&lt;/a&gt;</text></comment>
<story><title>Computing 10,000X more efficiently (2010) [pdf]</title><url>http://web.media.mit.edu/~bates/Summary_files/BatesTalk.pdf</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>ced</author><text>Off-topic: if an integral is an approximation of a physical process, then that process is an approximation of the integral. I.e. we could in principle have a &amp;quot;chip&amp;quot; running a miniature lab experiment (like water flowing) with sensors that would output &amp;quot;an approximate solution of the Navier-Stokes equations&amp;quot;. Numerical analysts would then write new versions of their algorithms assuming &amp;quot;an efficient hardware solution of N-S&amp;quot;. Has this concept ever been used anywhere? I guess quantum computing would qualify.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>anigbrowl</author><text>Analog computers used to be a thing. If you want to get into this now it&amp;#x27;s actually a good time, thanks to the resurgence in modular synthesizers, which are just analog computation optimized for audio ranges. You can easily find modules specifically for math operations and so forth.</text></comment>