I know a military contractor working on some pretty cool stuff, especially back in the day. On one of their projects they had to solve some really gnarly partial differential equation and weren't really getting anywhere. Since what they actually wanted were values (not the algebraic solution) what they ended up doing is building the equivalent circuit and measured what the voltage and current was in the circuit to get the values that they needed for some completely different domain.
I always thought that that way of thinking was pretty neat. Can the same abstraction have a different physical manifestation that's cheap to create? If you kinda squint a bit, it's what we do with computers.
I always thought that that way of thinking was pretty neat. Can the same abstraction have a different physical manifestation that's cheap to create? If you kinda squint a bit, it's what we do with computers.