What is a computer? Well, in the previous section, the discussion focused on the classical concept of a computer, what we often call a digital computer. This is the kind of computer we are all more aware. This is the way that you use - a Mac or PC. This is the kind which is used in business and at school. In fact, virtually every computer that currently exists on the planet is a digital computer. But there is another kind of computer that is fundamentally different from digital computer. It is so different in fact that some insist that this shouldn 't even called a computer. While we will consider in the future this issue, we will begin assuming that this is indeed a computer, just a different kind of computer.

While there are many names for him, we usually call a computer non-classical. But other names are used for computers that are not classical type: computer connectionist, artificial neural network, similar computer processor and distributed parallel, to name a few. The different names arise, in part, an attempt to identify special purpose that serves to distinguish it from digital computers. Since most computer non-classical devices have several distinctly different, it n'tonne not that there are several names for him. We shall now consider some of these properties. While not every computers non-conventional has all these properties, we assume that our computer typical non-classical (our paradigm of this type) has indeed all the properties described below.