Re: [Haskell-cafe] Re: Performance: MD5

Achim Schneider wrote:

Andrew Coppin wrote:

...

I wonder what would happen if you instead had a vast number of very simple proto-processors connected in a vast network. [But I'm guessing the first thing that'll happen is that the data is never where you want it to be...]

You're not thinking of neuronal networks, are you? The interesting thing there is that they unite code and data.

Damn; you've seen through my cunning disguise. ;-) In all seriousness, it's easy enough to build an artificial neural network that computes a continuous function of several continuous inputs. But it's much harder to see how, for example, you'd build a text parser or something. It's really not clear how you implement flow control with this kind of thing. It's so different to a Turing machine is appears to render most of current computer science irrelevant. And that's *a lot* of work to redo. Now, if you had a network of something a bit more complicated than artificial neurons, but less complicated than an actual CPU... you'd have... I don't know, maybe something useful? It's hard to say.