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Comment by igorkraw | Hacker News Reader

I am doing an internship in the lab where the cited paper was produced right now :-D

If anyone has questions, I'll do my best to answer or relay(maybe tomorrow though as it is late here). There also was a related discussion about 2 months ago:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16894818

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Is analog computing reproducible? Digital computing is kind of founded on the idea that running the same program twice will give the same results (i.e. determinism), but it seems to me that analog computing might simply fail to make that guarantee. Is that correct? And if so, have the implications and workarounds been investigated at all?

I expect within bounds... this already exists in floating point operations. Look up distributed games programming, x86, PPC etc for some meaty details, but the gist of it is to never trust the exact value, rather look for values within a suitable range.

Interesting take though - with analog computing, this problem would be everywhere rather than in certain special cases. There probably is some funky math we can use to describe and talk about on HN in the year 2029?

That it would be everywhere was exactly my point; I started listing all the sources of unpredictability in my comment but then I figured that wasn't necessary so I didn't go on that tangent. But yes, threading, floating point, RNGs, cache timing, etc. are all sources of randomness we deal with, but a computer where pretty much /any/ computation has to deal with randomness is a whole new ball game so far as I can tell.

Can you summarize the nature of the computations? I would guess this is stochastic integration. Where is the bandwidth passing information between computed results?

Could I get a copy of the pre-print?

Nevermind, sorry. The link to Nature wasn't functioning when this was first posted.

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