The True Heart of a Computer
What a computer REALLY is
Chitty Chitty… Bang! Bang!
A lot has been said about computation, Turing, Godel and Von Neumann got most of the classical stuff discovered and done by in the 20th Century. A little after that things were extended into the Quantum Realm and now, currently, a race is being run to see who can build the first viable Quantum Machine.
I have studied a lot of this stuff, mostly as an interested party and amateur enthusiast, but also as a want to be software engineer, with my mathematical hat on. I have no PhD and little first hand practical experience but I’ve done a lot of reading around people who have.
It is only recently that I truly began to understand the simplicity of the whole scheme we call computing. Studying Turing machines and the limits of computability mathematically is all great but I think it can be made far simpler than that, to truly understand “what a computer is”.
And why would you want to do that?
Well, I went out for a party with friends a couple of days ago. The dinner guests were very excited about some Netflix Series that showed the ‘power of social media’ and how ‘artificial intelligence’ was used to manipulate the masses to vote for demons like Trump.
I was the only person to argue counter-wise.
“Jack the Dork and Marc Cucker-Berg are not all powerful Masters of the Universe”, I countered.
I see them more like the Wizard of Oz and their ‘AI’ is just his “ropes and leavers” behind the curtain. Nothing but a show.
Netflix, is like the Child Catcher from Chitty Chitty Bang Bang:
(turn on images, “load photo’s” in your email app)
If you are watching Netflix (and I care not for your IQ or status in society), you are in the back of the truck, only you think that you are not, no… especially if you think you are not.
Bill Gates is the idiot Barron in the Castle.
Ah! But what to do?… you would rather laugh at The Vikid Truth… That is the way of the world.
But fear not. This article will perhaps help you see some light.
I have a sketch of writing about this all in a book format but that’s not happening anytime soon… (any publishers want to support me?! )
So as a primer I thought it might be interesting to put my ideas down in a post. Not sure if it is possible (given the complexities) but let’s give it a shot! Perhaps we will need two parts or more…
Abstraction
The idea of a computer is actually an abstraction. Where the process of abstraction is nothing more complicated than stripping away the non essential and focusing only on what is essential.
This suggests that you could build a computer out of rays of light, wood, plastic or electricity ( as happens to be the common case), for example. You could conceivably build one out of marshmallows and nothing else.
This is because we are thinking about the idea of what a computer does, not what it is made of, nor particularly in any “one way of doing it”.
I could go for my next meeting on foot, in a Toyota Camry (or Ferrari?) or by helicopter. But depending on what we are focusing on, we can strip off the nonessential / accidental issues.
My customer in general cares not how I arrive at any meeting.
In fact these days it’s happening by Zoom!
We focus solely on the fact that we have the destination (the next meeting, where something important is happening) and the fact that I need to make it across space to get there.
Wires and electrical devices are how most modern computers are built, as it is cheap and convenient, so we can stick with that as a mode of expression, just as long as we remember, it is not important.
What I am going to argue today is that,
a computer is nothing more than “Three forms of Energy” that can be “Utilized” or “Shuffled from One Location to Another” using “Communication Channels”.
A useful computer is where by we design a system that moves energy in predefined ways (processing) and can keep stable configurations of the energy (memory), in ways that we want.
It has almost nothing to do with “intelligence”,
except, the intelligence we put into it if course.
There is nothing terribly beautiful about paint in itself. Rembrandt on the other hand could create masterpieces with it.
Ok… I have given you an Abstract Definition, some what akin to a new age philosopher declaring,
“The whole world is vibration!!!”
to which I always replied, “Ok… now what?”.
Let’s proceed.
Wires
What is really astonishing is that a computer is little more than wires.
What we are looking at here is a Location A, another Location B and some form of ‘communication channel’ between them.
Lets call the communication channel, a ‘wire’.
What’s important about the wire is that it shields both A & B from the environment, so that only what is at ‘A’ arrives at ‘B’. Stuff from outside is not allowed to interfere.
It's also important to note that in essence A and B are nothing more than the different ‘ends’ of the same wire which just happen to be at ‘differing locations’.
And the only way we allow these locations to communicate is through/by the wire, by design.
‘A’ and ‘B’ have literally no more physicality than that.
All we have done is label each end of the same wire as ‘A’ and ‘B’.
But what are we communicating?
This is where we use the first form of Energy. In this case let’s call the first form of energy, ‘Electricity’ or ‘Potential’.
What we can do is insert some electricity into one end of the wire, the wire will carry that energy to to the other end.
That’s what a wire does!
You could pulse the energy, have it on constantly or whatever you want. The other end of the wire would reflect that.
As an added convenience, by convention alone, we decide that we decide to manipulate one side of the wire only. The other-side of the wire we can only measure what was done.
Then we can rename ‘A’, if that is the side we play on, as ‘Input’ and the other side ‘B’ that we measure on, as ‘Output’.
We decide by convention that we always send information one way only.
If we want to communicate from ‘B’ to ‘A’, we would use another wire.
This is the First and Most primitive ‘Computer’.
But what if we want to do something more complex?
Junctions
So allow configurations of wires such as this, with a junction. Now what is measured at the Output is a “sum” of Input A and Input B. I hope the Logic is simple enough to follow without too much explanation.
We could conceivably wire things in extremely complex ways with hundreds of thousands of inputs and outputs with any desired number of junctions.
We now have a more complex computer.
However there is one major draw back of our developing computer.
It’s that the ‘output has to always reflect the input’.
Our computer so far is like the funny reflections in a theme parks ‘hall of mirrors’. We can do wonderful transformations on the input but what if we want our system to be more than a glorified mirror?
On / Off
We now consider the following configuration.
Forgive my wonderful drawing style!
What we now do is use three wires, the ends of Wire 1 and 3 become Input and Output but the fun happens at Wire 2.
Here we have introduced two more forms of Energy that have the ability to ‘move the wire’.
The Motor uses the electrical energy (from another input wire) converted by induction into motion, it pushes up when given power.
(You may notice that a motor can be made for a coil of wire)
The Spring acts as a “store” of energy, it acts against the motors energy, converting the motion into Potential Energy. So if the motor powers down, the spring will restore the wire to its original position.
(You may notice a spring can be made by simply bending a wire)
We could connect things the other way too (as below), so that when the motor has no power, the spring is pushing the wire up and then we use the motors power to push the wire down and complete the connection.
It’s all just wires! Wires bent can store energy like a spring (potential) and wires coiled convert energy (by induction) into motion. This ‘Storage’ of energy can be used to build ‘memory’.
What’s another name for memory?
Storage?
You got it!
That’s it!
That’s all you need to build most complex computers in the world!
We haven’t talked about binary (100101110), we haven’t talked about NAND Gates.
There’s no silly math to obscure stuff. No BOOLEAN Algebra…
No F’ing Godel Numbers, Turing Machines, Finite Autómata or Regular Expressions.
No need for Transistors, NPN /PNP junctions, silicon and semi-conductors or anything else.
There is no platonic realm in where this all lives. There is seriously nothing that mysterious about it.
It just happens to be a fact that I can ‘represent’ close to anything I want if I use enough of these devises.
These devises can either ‘store’ representations or perform ‘transformations’ upon representations.
There absolutely nothing much intelligent about it, whether we call it ‘artificial’ or not.
The only intelligence really is the complex wiring that we do. And that’s a pretty brittle form of intelligence. Good for party tricks.
Good for also making a billion here or there or perhaps crashing the whole world economy. (as has happened)
It requires an
army of engineers making sure things don’t crash,
another army of engineers to monitor the systems,
another army to correct errors (and pretend nothing went wrong),
you need an army of stock analysts to ensure that everyone keeps investing in this “AI”.
You need and army of journalists to convince you that tech will solve all your problems.
You need Netflix to convince of its power.
The real power is in the “Armies of Engineers, Consultants and Salespeople”.
All of who are themselves either duped or bought off by the nonsense.
Automobiles and mechanical engines extended human capabilities in profound ways in the last century. The Information Age is doing something similar for our abilities to store, transmit and crunch data.
But it would be stupid to think it was anything but humans running the systems.
The systems “understand” nothing. Just like the Hubble telescope doesn’t see anything. Mirrors reflect light from the sky, sure, but the humans are doing the seeing.
It’s the same with AI, only this time certain humans are using AI as an excuse to do what they want to while “blaming” the machines.
I could spend an inordinate amount of time and space below showing you just how we can create memory using the above devises but there is little point. There are several books that do that.
The fact is simple. No arrangement of wires makes love or hate. No arrangement of these wires makes funny or sad. We can simplify complex arrangements into simpler ones for example:
Often, you need smart engineers to work something like this out. It’s called reduction. Or finding a solution. etc…
Other times you can go the other way, creating / generating complex outputs from simple inputs.
What we are taking about here is about principles of what a Computer REALLY is.
My 3 year old some can bang his spoons and forks on his plates in the dining room. He certainly makes a lot of sound, not much ‘music’ though. Similarly, you have now understood the principles behind computation. To make anything worthwhile and / or of interest, would require years of study.
Good Luck!
And That’s,
The Vikid Truth