Nagle@cup.portal.com (John - Nagle) (12/26/89)
1. Remember that the physical world has noise. The uncertanty
principle limits the precision of any analog simulation.
2. Recent work has resulted in an effective way to solve N-body
problems to an arbitrary level of precision and with high
speed. See "The Rapid Evaluation of Potential Fields in
Particle Systems", by L.F. Greengard, MIT Press, 1988.
ISBN 0-262-07110-X.
Systems with over a million bodies are now being solved using
these techniques.
3. Biological neurons are rather noisy components. If you would
like to see this for yourself, stop by the Exploratorium in San
Francisco, where a slug neuron has been wired up to a signal source
and a scope, and you can play with the inputs while watching the
output.
The overall behavior of a neural system doesn't seem to be that
sensitive to the exact transfer function of each neuron. If it
were, of course, brains would be much more fragile than they are.
This comment applies to both biological and synthetic neural systems.