The article clearly states that it’s using our colloquial meaning of “computer” as a metaphor to help convey their thought experiment. It even has a disclaimer about using metaphors.
FWIW I think it’s an interesting thought experiment. I think it’s especially interesting to draw the parallel to biology. Clearly our brains are doing computation by even the strictest definition of computer, so at which biological level does computation stop? A chunk of my brain is clearly doing computation, a neuron must be doing computation since that is the building block for our brains. Single cells must also be doing computation since a single cell had all of the computational knowledge encoded in it to build me. All of these processes are built upon physical reality, so it’s not that big a leap that similar processes might emerge elsewhere and at different scales and using different physical mechanisms.
This is awesome! As a software person who dabbles in hardware, I cannot believe that HW folks put up with such arcane, slow, and cumbersome tools. I think anyone who’s critical of this idea has no idea how good they could be having it.
Yeah Carmack is no doubt a 20x engineer, but I wouldn’t put him in the same category of prolific genius as Euler. As far as prolific engineers go, I’d say Fabrice Bellard would be closer (but still not even close) to an Euler.
All of ML, including DL, are literally implemented using mathematical models. Alas, a model is just a model and doesn’t imply it works well or imply that it’s simple or easily discoverable.