"Huh.  Share Language might be doing more useful work than I thought, if you're getting connotations like that."

"Fundamentally, 'computers' are - containers of raw causality, raw form, that a 'programmer', shaper-of-raw-form, can put into correspondence with real things or mathematical objects that you want to gain information about.  If you got any Validity off the transcripts, it was among the first things I taught here as the underpinning of what Law is at all, if you remember how 'axioms' pinned down the forms of numbers and implied the truths of arithmetic... well, um, either way."

"A 'computer' is something where you could start from YESes and NOs and connect them up by very simple rules like 'YES if the inputs are both YES' or 'YES if exactly one input is YES' and turn that into something which would multiply out 345 * 678 for you, so you didn't have to it by hand.  Which you'd do by shaping and connecting up systems of YES and NO that evolved over time, by rules that mortals specified, into a shape that mapped your intents about 345 and * and 678 into patterns of YES and NO, and evolved them into a new pattern that represented the answer to that, which I don't have memorized, in the same code and mapping."

"It's not, to be clear, that 'computers' are directly working with the underlying stuff of reality underneath all molecules and atoms.  You could make red and blue marks on paper, to represent YES and NO, and operate the rules yourself for how they evolve over time, and do a fraction of what 'computers' do.  'Computers' just do a lot of it very quickly.  They can multiply millions of numbers in a second.  'Computer-science' is how to do clever things by adding and multiplying and branching millions of numbers in a second.  And that is, in fact, how Civilization controls most complicated machines, and also how we end up talking to people on the opposite side of the world, without magic."

"The part where you directly work with the underlying 'realityfluid' beneath all molecules and atoms is 'quantum-computing'.  Though Civilization was just getting started on that.  'Quantum-computing' would let you do calculations that no ordinary computer could complete before the universe burned out, or get the results of calculations that were only actually performed inside a tiny subuniverse much less real than the universe that gets to look at the results -"

"Huh.  Share Language might be doing more useful work than I thought, if you're getting connotations like that."

"Fundamentally, 'computers' are - containers of raw causality, raw form, that a 'programmer', shaper-of-raw-form, can put into correspondence with real things or mathematical objects that you want to gain information about.  If you got any Validity off the transcripts, it was among the first things I taught here as the underpinning of what Law is at all, if you remember how 'axioms' pinned down the forms of numbers and implied the truths of arithmetic... well, um, either way."

"A 'computer' is something where you could start from YESes and NOs and connect them up by very simple rules like 'YES if the inputs are both YES' or 'YES if exactly one input is YES' and turn that into something which would multiply out 345 * 678 for you, so you didn't have to it by hand.  Which you'd do by shaping and connecting up systems of YES and NO that evolved over time, by rules that mortals specified, into a shape that mapped your intents about 345 and * and 678 into patterns of YES and NO, and evolved them into a new pattern that represented the answer to that, which I don't have memorized, in the same code and mapping."

"It's not, to be clear, that 'computers' are directly working with the underlying stuff of reality underneath all molecules and atoms.  You could make red and blue marks on paper, to represent YES and NO, and operate the rules yourself for how they evolve over time, and exactly duplicate what 'computers' do.  'Computers' just use much tinier marks and do a lot of it very quickly.  They can multiply millions of numbers in a second."

"'Computer-science' is how to do clever things by adding and multiplying and branching millions of numbers in a second.  And that is, in fact, how Civilization controls most complicated machines, and also how we end up talking to people on the opposite side of the world, without magic."

"The part where you directly work with the underlying 'realityfluid' beneath all molecules and atoms is 'quantum-computing'.  Though Civilization was just getting started on that.  'Quantum-computing' would let you do calculations that no ordinary computer could complete before the universe burned out, or get the results of calculations that were only actually performed inside a tiny subuniverse much less real than the universe that gets to look at the results -"

"Huh.  Share Language might be doing more useful work than I thought, if you're getting connotations like that."

"Fundamentally, 'computers' are - containers of raw causality, raw form, that a 'programmer', shaper-of-raw-form, can put into correspondence with real things or mathematical objects that you want to gain information about.  If you got any Validity off the transcripts, it was among the first things I taught here as the underpinning of what Law is at all, if you remember how 'axioms' pinned down the forms of numbers and implied the truths of arithmetic... well, um, either way."

"A 'computer' is something where you could start from YESes and NOs and connect them up by very simple rules like 'YES if the inputs are both YES' or 'YES if exactly one input is YES' and turn that into something which would multiply out 345 * 678 for you, so you didn't have to solve it by hand.  Which you'd do by shaping and connecting up systems of YES and NO that evolved over time, by rules that mortals specified, into a shape that mapped your intents about 345 and * and 678 into patterns of YES and NO, and evolved them into a new pattern that represented the answer to that, which I don't have memorized, in the same code and mapping."

"It's not, to be clear, that 'computers' are directly working with the underlying stuff of reality underneath all molecules and atoms.  You could make red and blue marks on paper, to represent YES and NO, and operate the rules yourself for how they evolve over time, and exactly duplicate what 'computers' do.  'Computers' just use much tinier marks and do a lot of it very quickly.  They can multiply millions of numbers in a second."

"'Computer-science' is how to do clever things by adding and multiplying and branching millions of numbers in a second.  And that is, in fact, how Civilization controls most complicated machines, and also how we end up talking to people on the opposite side of the world, without magic."

"The part where you directly work with the underlying 'realityfluid' beneath all molecules and atoms is 'quantum-computing'.  Though Civilization was just getting started on that.  'Quantum-computing' would let you do calculations that no ordinary computer could complete before the universe burned out, or get the results of calculations that were only actually performed inside a tiny subuniverse much less real than the universe that gets to look at the results -"