Pulse computation is a hybrid of
digital and
analog computation
A computation is any type of arithmetic or non-arithmetic calculation that is well-defined. Common examples of computation are mathematical equation solving and the execution of computer algorithms.
Mechanical or electronic devices (or, hist ...
that uses
aperiodic electrical spikes, as opposed to the
periodic voltages in a digital computer or the continuously varying voltages in an analog computer. Pulse streams are unclocked, so they can arrive at arbitrary times and can be generated by analog processes, although each spike is allocated a binary value, as it would be in a digital computer.
Pulse computation is primarily studied as part of the field of
neural network
A neural network is a group of interconnected units called neurons that send signals to one another. Neurons can be either biological cells or signal pathways. While individual neurons are simple, many of them together in a network can perfor ...
s. The processing unit in such a network is called a "neuron".
References
Computational neuroscience
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