JimBowie1958
Old Fogey
- Sep 25, 2011
- 63,590
- 16,797
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Wow, this is amazing stuff. Soon we may have computers that can operate in almost any conditions using any materials at hand.
Thank you Mindwars for bringing this article to the forum!
Radical technique could lead to AI with human-like intelligence | Daily Mail Online
And it turns out these could be even better for developing artificial intelligence than existing computers.
The idea is commonly known as 'reservoir computing' and came from attempts to develop computer networks modelled on the brain.
It involves the idea that we can tap into the behaviour of physical systems – anything from a bucket of water to blobs of plastic laced with carbon nanotubes – in order to harness their natural computing power.
Reservoir computers exploit the physical properties of a material in its natural state to do part of a computation.
This contrasts with the current digital computing model of changing a material's properties to perform computations.
For example, to create modern microchips we alter the crystal structure of silicon.
A reservoir computer could, in principle, be made from a piece of silicon (or any number of other materials) without these design modifications.
The basic idea is to stimulate a material in some way and learn to measure how this affects it.
If you can work out how you get from the input stimulation to the output change, you will effectively have a calculation that you can then use as part of a range of computations.
Thank you Mindwars for bringing this article to the forum!
Radical technique could lead to AI with human-like intelligence | Daily Mail Online
And it turns out these could be even better for developing artificial intelligence than existing computers.
The idea is commonly known as 'reservoir computing' and came from attempts to develop computer networks modelled on the brain.
It involves the idea that we can tap into the behaviour of physical systems – anything from a bucket of water to blobs of plastic laced with carbon nanotubes – in order to harness their natural computing power.
Reservoir computers exploit the physical properties of a material in its natural state to do part of a computation.
This contrasts with the current digital computing model of changing a material's properties to perform computations.
For example, to create modern microchips we alter the crystal structure of silicon.
A reservoir computer could, in principle, be made from a piece of silicon (or any number of other materials) without these design modifications.
The basic idea is to stimulate a material in some way and learn to measure how this affects it.
If you can work out how you get from the input stimulation to the output change, you will effectively have a calculation that you can then use as part of a range of computations.
