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Is a collection of balls falling down a galton board into bins to form a normal distribution a form of processing? How is it materially different than a ball rolling down a hill?

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If you draw an imaginary line around the galton board and then if there was some outcome based on the balls falling into bins (the weight of the bins makes some other thing happen ...) then yeah I guess you'd call that a processor. It takes an input coded as balls and produces an output via bin weights. If it could reset itself rather than be a one-shot thing that would help.

I mean I'm not saying it conscious or anything. I'm just saying it has agency, which is to say "it is a thing that does things"

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