Quote from: JoelKatz on April 30, 2014, 06:39:26 AM

Quote from: shorena on April 30, 2014, 05:20:58 AM

Its allways the same, either you have time or you have space. You need less time if you have more space, as its with rainbow tables. Still in my book a table is still something that was precalculated and does no calculation whatsoever.

So let's say you have a machine that has two wheels that can each be set for a number from zero to ten. You push a button, and an LED display lights up with the sum of those two numbers. Do you have to look inside the machine to tell if it's calculating or not?

Yes. I dont want to go further into this because I feel every example either of us can give just confuses how a computer actually works.

Thats what we are talking about after all. RAM as in the memory unit of a von Neumann machine. Almost every computer today is von Neumann architecture. A von Neumann machine is made of: the memory unit, the control unit, the logic unit (or arithmetic logic unit). As well as input and output, which does not matter here. The control unit fetches the commands and data from the memory unit and feeds them into the logic unit, which writes a result into the memory unit.
Where is the calculation of the memory unit? Its just a place where data (and commands) come in and out.