I think Steve's comments about Super Regeneration are very interesting. "... things can be made super-sensitive ..., like standing a pencil on its point. This is called "regeneration" because in some way 99.999% of the output is fed back into the input (with the pencil it is 100.000%, which is why you can't stand a pencil on its point). In the case of the pencil, the energy that is used to regenerate is gravity. The problem with regeneration ... is that it is slow (like the time it takes to stand a pencil on its point) and not readily adaptable to responding to signals, e.g. specific correlations, frequencies, etc., though regenerative receivers have been made.
However, super-regeneration (SR) sidesteps the limitations of regeneration, and does NOT need any sort of exquisite adjustment to achieve its nearly limitless sensitivity. It is the adjustment that makes regeneration slow, so SR can respond immediately without the "settling time" of regeneration. In SR, the pencil is let drop, then quickly stood up and let drop again, and again, and again. The output is the time to fall, rather than slowly searching for the point of perfect balance. Microscopic changes that would be seen as shifts in the pencil's balance instead become changes in the time to fall in its rapidly repeating cycle." It's too bad that he won't explore this idea with some simple computer algorithms and see where it takes him. If I had more time I would try it. It could be used to repeatedly react to some input like a variation of some a neural network. I suppose that variations of this have been used in digital circuits and other algorithms and perhaps that specific idea is not, in itself, as interesting to Steve as it is to me. But Steve's interest in the change (delta t) of the reactions also seems interesting. A variation of this idea might be useful in image analysis. The input could be sent to different threads which would test it using different 'oscillation' actions and different parameter values to the different actions used in the tests. That is very interesting. Jim Bromer ------------------------------------------- AGI Archives: https://www.listbox.com/member/archive/303/=now RSS Feed: https://www.listbox.com/member/archive/rss/303/21088071-f452e424 Modify Your Subscription: https://www.listbox.com/member/?member_id=21088071&id_secret=21088071-58d57657 Powered by Listbox: http://www.listbox.com
