Dave writes: < My claim, as such, is more analogous to the argument that audiophiles advance with regard digital sound. When you digitize you create a square wave within the confines of the analog wave. Unless your sampling rate is infinite, there will always be some information loss — the gaps between the two wave forms. Audiophiles say that the lost information is important and that they can detect its absence. The computer scientist responds with BS - the information lost is below the sensitivity of the human ear and therefore does not matter. Empirical tests with commercially used sampling rates prove the computer scientists wrong.>
Audiophiles can detect a difference because a non-digital reproduction is full of noise that is absent in the digital reproduction. Extraordinary measures are needed to control noise in analog computers, e.g. protection from the interference by natural and artificial sources of electromagnetic radiation and single-digit millikelvin temperatures. Anyway, sampling rates can easily be increased. < The kind of social-cultural-economic-political problems I speak of, with all their dimensions, multiplies the "lost information" along all those dimensions and, I believe, that information matters. Computational thinking is necessarily constrained by what the computer can do — the square wave. Solving such problems requires a way of thinking that incorporates all of that lost information (that the Comp Thinker deem irrelevant). > Computing is not limited to square waves. Quantum computers are analog computing devices, whether they use discrete variables (qubits) or continuous variables (qumodes). To get your point, I do think that the “lost” social-cultural-economic-political information is in the category of various undesirable noise processes that should be isolated and attenuated. Marcus
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