What is a computer?
Computers are physical machines
- Turing machines afford universal computation
- But this is a mathematical abstraction, not a computer
What differentiates a computer from any other machine?
- Computers process information
- Computers recognize patterns of symbols
- Computers execute stored programs
- and alter their processing based on the data (conditional jumps)
So what is a computer ?
- A machine that performs “a computation”???