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Aligning the representation and reality of computation with asynchronous logic automata

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Abstract

There are many models of computation, but they all share the same underlying laws of physics. Software can represent physical quantities, but is not itself written with physical units. This division in representations, dating back to the origins of computer science, imposes increasingly heroic measures to maintain the fiction that software is executed in a virtual world. I consider instead an alternative approach, representing computation so that hardware and software are aligned at all levels of description. By abstracting physics with asynchronous logic automata I show that this alignment can not only improve scalability, portability, and performance, but also simplify programming and expand applications.

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  1. The Center for Bits and Atoms, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Cambridge, MA, USA

    Neil Gershenfeld

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  1. Neil Gershenfeld
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Correspondence to Neil Gershenfeld.

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Gershenfeld, N. Aligning the representation and reality of computation with asynchronous logic automata. Computing 93, 91–102 (2011). https://doi.org/10.1007/s00607-011-0160-1

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s00607-011-0160-1

Keywords

Mathematics Subject Classification (2000)