Talk:Computer for operations with functions

This file is a candidate for speedy deletion

I - author of the article, of which copied the picture. Article is open access. What else is needed to confirm the rights? Thank. --Solikkh (talk) 15:40, 3 June 2011 (UTC)

if talking about the article, it really is not a candidate for deletion. the book alone is a vital obscure and historic piece of Computing history, that must have been well-known in Russia but completely unknown to the rest of the world. or was there a different meaning to the word "file"? Lkcl (talk) 13:08, 14 July 2025 (UTC)

Is this not just SIMD?

I cannot really make head or tails of the main section, but it appears this design was intended to apply the same function to an array of data. This is essentially the SIMD (or MIMD) approach. I suspect this is simply a Russian name for the same design, and as such, should not have its own article. Maury Markowitz (talk) 17:11, 20 October 2016 (UTC)

ohh it is most definitely not SIMD. firstly it is Vector Processing (see the article on the same) but it appears to have Hardware-level support for Higher Order Functions (!!) as best I can tell. additionally I know of absolutely no processor - and I have studied dozens - which has hardware support for differentiation and other such functions. this historic design is revolutionary. as a historic design it is worth its own page in its own right. Lkcl (talk) 13:06, 14 July 2025 (UTC)

i don't like doing this but hhave enough understanding of chatgpt's limitations to know that it can reasonably faithfully "transliterate" and also summarise. https://chatgpt.com/share/68791d85-99ac-800b-be90-40d9565243ad and the results are genuinely useful. first immediate fact: the processor was a hybrid analog-digital computer. there exists no SIMD machine today that processes analog data. i am astounded delighted and impressed: this machine was really really special and historic. Lkcl (talk) 16:00, 17 July 2025 (UTC)

I'm... not sure Chad McGPT figured it out here; from the chatgpt.com link, it appears to have been pointed at the Wikipedia article, not at, for example, the "Ahead of his Time" section of the translated Pioneers of Soviet Computing, or at the equivalent section of the original.

From what Computer for operations with functions § Positional codes of one-variable functions is saying, it looks as if it's encoding polynomial functions using the coefficients, but there's a lot left out, e.g. "y is a certain function of argument x" doesn't say what function that is.

This article needs massive attention from, ideally, a subject matter expert fluent in Russian; unfortunately, I'm neither (my Russian is rusty as hell, and I'm unfamiliar with the machine). Perhaps a combination of a subject matter expert not fluent in Russian and a Russian translator familiar with technical terminology would also help. Guy Harris (talk) 20:48, 18 August 2025 (UTC)

I've added {{Expert needed}}. Guy Harris (talk) 20:54, 18 August 2025 (UTC)

This machine may be Kartsev's M-9, as per the book given as the first reference. Вычислительная система М-9 ("Computing system M-9") seems to give some information, at least as Prof. Siri translates it while on safari. Searching for Mikhail Kartsev M-9 turned that up as well as some other possibilities.

I don't know whether the encoding of functions talked about is the same as what Khmelnik is discussing or not. Guy Harris (talk) 21:11, 18 August 2025 (UTC)