OK, this is increasingly off-topic, but I’m just getting into Eurorack and I’ve been become curious about analog computers… not because I know anything about them, but because they share a user-interface style.
Can you speak to similarities between them? You seem to know a bit about both topics.
Thanks! With the caveat that I profoundly lack depth on both, and am a bit artsy craftsy in my intuitions, I did buy the Maths module precisely because it was an analog computer.
The intent was to create some generative music, and seeing if I could use it to create 1/f noise, and exploring self-similarity using a musical ear instead of in code. Still working on it.
When you look at what you can do with magnets hooked to a synth with a ferrofluid, e.g. https://youtu.be/Q3oItpVa9fs , the sound and your ear helps to develop an sense for what kinds of waves can be used to yield physical effects. If you can functionally suspend and maipulate a ferrofluid with waves, there are likely analogies to laser pulses and electrons for quantum computing. Waves gonna wave, etc.
The other piece that grabbed me recently was "analog fractals," (https://hackaday.com/tag/analog-fractals/ + that rabbit hole) where if you can get those artifacts instantaneously as the effect of physical feedback instead of rendering them computationally, there are likely faster functional approaches to a lot of other problems, only a subset of which we use ASICs and FPGAs to implement today.
It's speculative based on laughably incomplete understandings on my part, but that's hacking.
Can you speak to similarities between them? You seem to know a bit about both topics.