Electronic Engineering Journal

During six-plus decades of adherence to the Turing paradigm, the computer field has reaped the benefits of ever- faster and -denser (and -reliable) hardware. Over the same span of decades, the creation and maintenance of software hasn’t gotten any easier and remains problematic, especially in matters of implementation, integration, and system safety.

Computation as a technique that was formulated to solve cryptography via instruction-dominated symbol-swapping may not be the most appropriate means of monitoring and controlling real-world physical processes, yet that’s what 98% of the billions of microprocessors and their derivatives fabricated each year are made to do.

The tangled threads of linear-sequential operation tend to inhibit each other and may cause faulty operation. After these decades of experience, hasn’t a better way been developed? Even the “massively parallel” solutions are processors that have been slaved to operate in lock-step, but they are each linear-sequential systems at their cores: shared-resource hardware arranged to manage data in spatial memory addresses via step-by-step software instructions.

We can do better but if we could, who would be its champion?