Seeing red

[emjay]

1.  It's a universal gate.  Pile them together and you can realize -any gate- in their aggregate...and thus any function of any comp system.  This is an interesting run in for me...but ask yourself what kind of architecture would be well suited to the sorts of growth by repetition inherent to life?  Redundant ones, ofc.  A simple block that can be arranged in every way the system might require.  Nothing fancy, no top down design work to do.  Just repeat ad infinitum (or until you run out of headspace).  I think neurons are the biological equivalent of universal gates architecturally - but in terms of processing power they're probably more like full alus+......

From the point of view of digital electronics, functional completeness means that every possible logic gate can be realized as a network of gates of the types prescribed by the set. In particular, all logic gates can be assembled from either only binary NAND gates, or only binary .

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Functional_completeness

2. Some gates can accept as many inputs as you like hypothetically (some gates are defined by the numbers of inputs and outputs though), and as many as you can cram in the space, practically (the same is true for outputs).  The number of inputs though, can affect the robustness of the system in either way depending on what it's being tasked to do.  For example...if you want C to be red apple....and you have A red and B apple.  If you add a third input, X water.  Your gate will fail to yield C red apple, even if it yields red and apple...because it did not yield water as well.  The number of outputs doesn't have that effect, though, and so those are essentially "free" in the context of the red apple problem as it relates to a three input AND gate.  You'd want as many outputs as possible to distribute the state to as many parts of the system as might be useful.  Bussing, basically......bussing from hell.  Full interconnectivity would be the ideal towards which you'd strive..but ultimately, fail at our scale of manufacture.  The scale of manufacture that goes into neurons..however, is much finer.

Cool... I understand This will be fun to try and model a neuron this way and to see what an equivalent basic repeatable block in computing terms would look like... so that machines could 'evolve'... but ultimately the kind of connectivity in the brain is something I - and you I think - don't think would ever be feasible in practice... not just bussing from hell but with the Devil's blessing. Because in the brain, there's a certain amount of plasticity, and axons and dendrites can grow, essentially changing connectivity during the life of the system and adding inputs and outputs to a 'gate'. And synaptic learning as well having a similar variable effect on the inputs of a gate. But still, it will be fun to see if at least a neuron could be modelled, even roughly