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The Soul of an Old Machine: Revisiting the Timeless von Neumann Architecture
Revisiting the timeless Von Neumann Architecture
Although the solution of partial differential equations frequently involves the manipulation of many thousands of words, these data are generally required only in blocks which are well within the 2^12 capacity of the electronic memory. The first of these purposes is to retain in a sum or product as many significant digits as possible and the second of these is to free the human operator from the burden of estimating and inserting into a problem"scale factors" —multiplicative constants which serve to keep numbers within the limits of the machine Specifically: (a) x and y themselves are likely to be the results of similar round-offs, directly or indirectly inherent, i.e. x and y themselves should be viewed as unbiased n-digit approximations of “true” x′ and y′ values; (b) by talking of “variances” and “means” we are introducing statistical concepts.
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