Category
Tools For Thinking About Computers
Description
A virtual machine is what you get when you impose a particular pattern of instructions (more literally, dispositions) on a real machine that has lots of plasticity—interacting parts that can be in many different states. Since a virtual machine does informational work, it can do the same job as a computer whose “moving parts” are state-changes in hardware by making all those state-changes in representations of those moving parts.The concept of a virtual machine is one of the most useful imagination-stretchers to come out of computer science, and having proved its worth in that domain, it is ripe for importing to other areas.
Person
Resource Datasbase
Source
Philosopher Daniel Dennett's Book Intuition Pumps