我是學心靈哲學的，對電腦一竅不通。 想請問discrete和distributed這兩個詞的差異。 首先是Turing在Computing Machinery and Intelligence(1950)中， 談到神經系統與數位電腦的不同； "The nervous system is certainly not a discrete state machine. A small error in the information about the size of a nervous impulse impinging on a neuron may make a large difference to the size of the outgoing impulse. It may be argued that, this being so, one cannot expect to be able to mimic the behavior of the nervous system with a discrete state system." Turing也提到人腦是"continuous machine"(對比discrete state machine)。 而John Searle在與Dennett論戰的一篇文章中談數位電腦與類神經網路的區別： "A digital computer, the kind you are likely to buy in a store today, proceed by a series of steps performed very rapidly, millions per second. This is called a serial computer, and because the initial designs were by John von Neumann, it is sometimes called a von Neumann machine. Recently there have been efforts to build machines that operate in parallel, that is , with several computaional channels working at once and interacting with each other. In physical structure these are more like human brains. They are not really much like brains, but certainly they are more like brains than the traditional von Neumann machines. Computations of this type are called variously Parallel Distributed Processing, Neuronal Net Modeling, or simply Connectionism." 合這兩篇來看， 數位電腦又是discrete state machine, 又是serial machine， 類神經網又是parallel distributed machine, 又是continuous machine。 想請問：既然serial，為何又可以discrete? 既然continous, 為何又可以distributed? 謝謝。 --

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