alt Hacker News> Why use splines or polynomials or haphazardly chosen basis functions if you can just fit (gradient descent) your data or wave functions to the proper computational EML tree?
Same reason all boolean logic isn't performed with combinations of NAND – it's computationally inefficient. Polynomials are (for their expressivity) very quick to compute.
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Nevermark • today at 4:52 AM
They are done with transistors though. Transistors form an efficient, single element, universal digital basis.
And are a much less arbitrary choice than NAND, vs. NOR, XOR, etc.
Using transistors as conceptual digital logic primitives, where power dissipation isn't a thing, Pass Logic is "The Way".
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The Cray 1 was built 100% from NOR gates and SRAM.