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Thoughts on Computing

April 14, 2003

Two things in this post:

1. I chanced upon Amorphous Computing today. It addresses what could essentially be considered "computing by swarms" - how do cells come together and create a multicellular creature? They pose the question, "How do we obtain coherent behavior from the cooperation of large numbers of unreliable parts that are interconnected in unknown, irregular, and time-varying ways?" Very interesting stuff.

2. Things in nature compute, but don't explicitly use mathematics. A bird flies through the air without regard for considering the tangent or cosine of angles. When you run, you don't perform calculations do determine where to place your feet. So here's my question: Are we approaching computing in the right way? Sure, it's great for solving equations and stuff. But is it the right way to, for example, go about developing artificial intelligence?

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