At Facebook, which incubated this project, virtually all of the servers are Open Compute machines.
The experiment was performed over cluster containing six compute machines (five workers and one master node).
The picture that emerges is of the mind (or the brain if you prefer) as some kind of inferring machine; perhaps some kind of computing machine, since computations are themselves plausibly construed as chains of inference.
In 1936, mathematician Alan Turing published a definition of a theoretical "universal computing machine", a computer which held its program on tape, along with the data being worked on.
His most important contribution to the history of computing remains his 1936 publication "On Computable Numbers", in which he describes a theoretical computing machine that can follow a set of instructions in a step-by-step fashion.
It is already clear that this new replacement will have a profound influence upon our lives, but it is not clear to the man of the street what this influence will be.... To understand what a computing machine is, let us compare a paper scheme of mathematical computation, a Chinese... abacus and a Marchand or Fridén decimal computing machine for office use, and an electronic computing machine.
Today, with the dominance of computers throughout society, the universe is increasingly being described as a computing machine with the basic stuff that the universe being bits of information -- or qubits, which are the information units in quantum computers.
A computing machine was needed to model the explosion before the actual test was done.
Turing was able to prove that no computing machine of the kind he envisaged could solve the decision problem.
In doing so, Turing worked out in great detail the basic concepts of a universal computing machine that is, a computing machine that could, at least in theory, do anything that a special-purpose computing device could do.
