X-Message-Number: 4346
From:  (Thomas Donaldson)
Subject: neural nets
Date: Wed, 3 May 1995 21:23:32 -0700 (PDT)

For those who have been following this discussion a very interesting article
has just appeared in the 28 April 1995 issue of SCIENCE. It seems that 
neural nets may actually do MORE than Turing machines. The reason, basically,
is that Turing machines work only in integers and are finite while neural
nets, as analog devices, depend on real numbers rather than integers.

The article is on p.545, by HT Siegelmann, titled "Computation beyond the
Turing limit". I am still deciding whether or not to discuss it in PERIASTRON.

In fact, that issue had other interesting stuff for those involved with
computers. There has been more work on devising computers based on DNA (the
idea is not that the chemistry would be fast, but that you could have 
orders of magnitude more processors working on the problem, with the final
effect that you get your answer much faster than with any current machine).
There was also an interesting letter about the possibility of using a large
vat of DNA as an extremely large content-addressable memory... again, one
which would dwarf anything available now.

			Best and long long life,

				Thomas Donaldson


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