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Comment by Daub | Hacker News Reader

I teach a creativity and innovation course at my uni. There are many examples I share with my students of inventions which started life as observations of nature (e.g. Velcro came about from observing how burrs stick to the fur of the inventor's dog). My bones tell me that there are discoveries about computing waiting to be made from observing how things are done in nature, particularly in the human mind. I imagine the result to be fundamental: changing the very nature of how computing is conceived of.

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A lot of how we conceive of computation today is based on observation of nature. It's the a logical conclusion to the study of logic, which is a line of inquiry that dates back to antiquity when sophistry was becoming a real institution and there was yet no real systematic way of determining if something was true other than whether it sounded true.

I'm not sure that nature and logic are related in the way you imply.

A different question: Is not the atomic indivisible of computing no more that a simple switch? A binary? Is there an equivalent for this in the human mind/brain? I suspect not but would like to hear from someone who knows more.

Logical thought is the lines of thought that consistently lets us predict nature. Without nature there would be no such thing as fact, and without fact, there can be no logic, since a proposition can't be true or false.

>Is not the atomic indivisible of computing no more that a simple switch? A binary?

It is for the dominant computing paradigm currently in use, but that isn't a universal truth. As I understand it, we use binary logic primarily because it's more tractable for humans to think about and work with, not because it's the only option or even the best option in all cases. For instance there are plenty of analog computers in history, which are in some ways more closely related to biological "computers".

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Analog_computer

To my understanding, the main advantage of digital over analog logic in computing was (and probably still is) its resistance to small errors. Nonlinear components like transistors and vacuum tubes aren't exactly the most consistent parts, and factors like ambient temperature can make even otherwise linear parts a little wonky. The "on/off" paradigm gives you a lot of tolerance of deviations from the ideal. Storage is also a big factor: it's really hard to store analog values, whereas on/off is approximately trivial.

There's the entire field of nature-inspired optimization:

https://arxiv.org/pdf/1307.4186.pdf

Convolutional neural networks come to mind.

Specifically inspired by the human brain.

https://www.ibm.com/topics/neural-networks#:~:text=Their%20n...

I recommend this book a lot, but 'Cats’ Paws and Catapults: Mechanical Worlds of Nature and People' (https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/223609.Cats_Paws_and_Cat...) is a great look at how biology inspires human design.

One idea that is important (IIRC from this book) is that many examples are really inspiration, and not direct copying of design. Biology works very differently to human machines, with very different constraints, so when engineers and designers try to stick too closely to the biological original, it may not work out very well!

A great reference. Many thanks.

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