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SUMMARY:Some Computations are Experiments - Nico Formánek
DTSTART;TZID=US/Central:20260715T133000
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DTSTAMP:20260726T082328Z
UID:pretalx-iacap-2026-3GBMA9@pretalx.iacapconf.org
DESCRIPTION:(Talk formerly titled "An epistemic problem for implementation
 ")\nMany accounts in philosophy of computation distinguish between abstrac
 t notions of computation and physical systems computing concretely. Ontolo
 gically this distinction seems plausible. As many engineers can attest\, o
 ne needs to arrange matter in highly contrived ways to coax it into comput
 ing. The relation between abstract and physical computation is called impl
 ementation. We rely on the implementation of boolean logic in solid-state 
 circuitry for our everyday computing needs. But we should be careful not t
 o generalize the success of solid-state circuitry to other physical system
 s. For implementation poses an epistemic problem. To make matter compute\,
  one needs to know how to arrange it and one needs to be sure that it will
  compute correctly - at least in most of the cases. I will discuss a case 
 of analogue electronic circuitry\, namely an op-amp based analogue equival
 ent of certain system of ordinary differential equations\, where it is unc
 lear if the circuitry implements the differential equations it was set up 
 to implement. There are two reasons why we cannot be sure of the implement
 ation: 1) We do not have analytic solutions of the differential equations 
 in question. 2) The numerical solution of the discretized version shows a 
 different behaviour than the analogue circuitry. We now face the epistemic
  problem of which computation we should believe. Do we vouch for the analo
 gue circuitry because we suspect problems with the discretization\, or do 
 we go with the numerical solution blaming noise and unaccounted errors in 
 the analogue electronics? Rather than trying to come up with a philosophic
 al answer to this question\, I will discuss how it has been answered histo
 rically in the case of digital and analogue computer engineering and argue
  that the current renaissance of analogue and hybrid computers might shake
  the old consensus.
LOCATION:Apollo Auditorium
URL:https://pretalx.iacapconf.org/iacap-2026/talk/3GBMA9/
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