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An analog computer or analogue computer is a type of computation machine (computer) that uses physical phenomena such as electrical, mechanical, or hydraulic quantities behaving according to the mathematical principles in question (analog signals) to model the problem being solved.
For example, 1.5 × 30 (which equals 45) will show the same result as 1 500 000 × 0.03 (which equals 45 000). This separate calculation forces the user to keep track of magnitude in short-term memory (which is error-prone), keep notes (which is cumbersome) or reason about it in every step (which distracts from the other calculation requirements).
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An analog computer is a form of computer that uses electrical, mechanical, or hydraulic phenomena to model the problem being solved. More generally an analog computer uses one kind of physical quantity to represent the behavior of another physical system, or mathematical function. Modeling a real physical system in a computer is called simulation.
The general purpose analog computer (GPAC) is a mathematical model of analog computers first introduced in 1941 by Claude Shannon. [1] This model consists of circuits where several basic units are interconnected in order to compute some function. The GPAC can be implemented in practice through the use of mechanical devices or analog electronics.
The term supercomputer itself is rather fluid, and the speed of today's supercomputers tends to become typical of tomorrow's ordinary computer. Supercomputer processing speeds are measured in floating-point operations per second, or FLOPS. An example of a floating-point operation is the calculation of mathematical equations in real numbers.
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Some notable examples of women in the history of computing are: Ada Lovelace: wrote the addendum to Babbage's Analytical Machine. Detailing, in poetic style, the first computer algorithm; a description of exactly how The Analytical Machine should have worked based on its design. Grace Murray Hopper: a pioneer of computing.