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Chaotic Computing In Practice
codyhess writes "The Economist published a great article detailing efforts to use Chaos in computing - "Speaking at the American Physical Society's annual March conference, William Ditto of the University of Florida told of his efforts to create a 'chaotic computer'."
Dr. Ditto can create standard logic gates (AND, OR, etc) that output a value according the their chaotic threshhold. Different logic operations can be performed by simply changing the threshhold, making an incredibly flexible computer that can perfom different functions instantaneously."
Check out the date of the article - April 1st...
analog computers of old. IIRC they were used for ballistics calculations and similar by the military.
Here is an example.
Look into what kind of mathematical operations can be realized with multiplying DACs.
The way I see it (although I am not a mathematician), the major hurdle to realizing this is the fact that generating random numbers usually results in patterns.
"Teleporting Rodents with D-Cell Battery Displacement" theory -- IgnoramusMaximus (692000)
Chaotic systems are actually quite controlloable in a very interesting way. The key property that makes a chaotic system so unpredictable is divergence -- if two copies of the system differ by delta, that delta will grow exponentially in time (doubling according to a coefficient call the Lyapunov coefficient). Yet, the divergence is never arbitrary. Instead, the divergence in chaotic systems happen within a space called the strange attractor - the diverging trajectories stay within in the attractor zone even as the split from each other.
If you map the strange attractor and nudge the system are the right point of the cycle, you can push the system into what ever mode of behaviro you want. Although you cannot predict the longterm behavior of the chaotic system, you can perturb it periodicaly to stabiize it or rapidlly shift its behavior. Scientists are looking at how to use this chaotic control theory to control unstable systems such as ultrahigh power lasers, manuerable jet aircraft, and heart tissue.
The key controlling a chaotic system is to understand how the chaotic system diverges (the shape of the strange attractor) and use that knowledge to deftly inject perturbations at just the right moment.
Two wrongs don't make a right, but three lefts do.
It is the hardware side that uses chaos, not the software. Details are sketchy in the article, but I believe they are looking at chaotic systems and tweaking the hardware to use different regions of behavior depending on the desired use.
And, yes, there are reasons we're not all programming in LISP.
Things to do today: See list of things to do yesterday
Uhhh... Chaotic _GOOD_, not lawful.
Lawful is on the same axis as Chaotic.
{ Lawful, Neutral, Chaotic }
{ Good, Neutral, Evil }
I'm a huge dork.
That's too narrow definition of chaotic system, because Lyaponov coeefficients and strange attractors realted only to dynamical systems wich have a toplogy - that is some underlying continuity. However there is another type of object which exhibit chaotic behavior, though only in infinite areas - discrete objects like cellular automata, which have no notion of divergence, and discussed more in term of complexity This chatic computing idea is in fact related to cellular automata. Cellular automata is a perfect example simple, completly deterministic discrete system, which behavior very difficalt and sometimes impossible to predict
Here is a paper that describes using chaotic gates as "universal gates".
There are some problems with the article: it makes claims that aren't backed up. So what's new on slashdot? Anyway, here are the gory details from my point of view. The original source reference appears to suffer from the same problem.
The gist of the new idea is a clever way to create a special type of gate whose dynamical threshold value can be modified to implement one of several possible logic gates. An interesting idea, but not computationally revolutionary. These gates would still implement the same chips we use today.
Now, the article goes on to claim that there is a wonderful new horizon of modifiable computation. I see a lot of words and no details. How are those modifiable threshold levels in these gates stored, anyway? Don't tell me it's with something like a flip-flop. It would be asinine to need 6-8 gates to store each bit of the modifiable threshold value for one "chaotic" gate.
Also, there's the small problem that we can MODEL any type of strange new computational paradigm and have been able to for years. We're no closer to a replacement for Turing-style computation than we were decades ago. I've seen one paper about Analog computers being able to compute some esoteric set of functions that discrete computers can't touch, but I haven't seen anyone explain how this helps in any useful way.