R68-18 Random Pulse Machines

In conventional digital computation, continuous quantities are quantized and represented by binary words in which the number of bits determines the precision of representation. In stochastic computation, as described in this paper, continuous quantities are represented as a sequence of one-bit binary words (i. e., as a pulse stream or sequence of logic levels) in which the probability of an ON logic level is a measure of the quantity. Since probability is a continuous variable in the range O≤p≤1, this removes the effects of quantization. However, a probability cannot be measured precisely, only estimated subject to random variance, and hence there is an effective random noise in the output of the computer.