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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."
I am not a physicist, engineer, or scientist (or anything else qualified to answer this) but it seems to me, the simple minded one, that once you start controlling something, it isn't chaotic. I mean- if they are basing decisions on this, then it can't be completely chaotic, can it? How can you derive an AND, OR, etc, from chaos without controlling it (thus negating the chaos). Can someone dumb this down a little for those of us who aren't in the know?
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Couple of thoughts:
This isn't quite the same thing as having randomly perturbed input thresholds, which is how neurons work. And, as anyone who's tried it knows, neurons are only about 95% efficient in determining the correct result. It takes a lot of logical processing on top of the neural bitwise decisionmaking to distill the 95% to the 99% or so correct answer rate that constitutes "intelligent thought".
And, they'd better look into real-world noise margin requirements for thresholding electrical switching decisions, or "chaotic" is all their output will ever be.
this is "self modifying hardware", similar to "self modifying code". but is it fair to call it chaotic? In a chaotic system, the process remains the same but the output varies. In this situation, both the process and the data change over time. Or can a chaotic system also be one where the rules change as well?? Experts??
personally, SMC is a bitch to debug, I can't imaging how one would begin to debug THIS beast...
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wow, after reading your post, your sig takes on a strange new meaning...
But this would still be limited to the confines of the Church-Turing hypothesis. Fundamentally, it doesn't seem to be a stronger model of computation. Even quantum computing is a different model than the Turing machine, however it is not yet known if it is strictly stronger. At a first glance, this just seems to be a novel way of making reconfigurable circuits. But can it beat the Turing machine? I doubt it...
Think of it this way:
Imagine you could watch two one-hour long TV shows simultaneously superimposed onto each other on the same TV (and understand both shows seperately.) Now imagine you have have two TV with the same capability. Now you can watch four shows in one hour. This is the essence of this computing theory: you can do more calculations in less time but not in the normal computing sense. I prefer to think of standard binary computing as a direct derivative of quantum computing, much like velocity is a derivative of acceleration.
The chaos theory simply describes the elements that are involved in forming these calculations. This would directly affect a computer's ability to multitask - instead of a data flow going in a straight line and different parts of the processor performing different operations on it, a function could be self-contained and processed recursively, with the data passing through the same matrix, while that matrix changes itself to perform different functions. In theory, this could take far less ticks, increasing speeds exponentially. Add more matrices to this and you can see the benefits.
The idea behind his work is to be able to control the input into these "chaotic elements" thus producing a predictable and reproducable output. A true 'quantum leap', if you will. This would be a significant jump in computing technology, skipping over "trinary" computing altogether.
Humans don't think in straight lines, why should computers? Then again, I could just be reading it wrong.
with multiple images. Years ago a company I was working at had an FPGA that could store 4 images and switch between them every clock cycle, no chaos required.
For those who don't know, an FPGA is a flexible computer chip. Imagine a motherboard full 100,000s or millions of solid state "glue logic" gates that could be re-aranged by little elves repeatedly, and that's an FGPA, but larger, and less expensive. You could build an 8088, then a DSP, then a fast FFT, a converter, then a crypto processor, whatever. Creative uses them on some soundblasters so the hardware (yes, the hardware) can be upgraded ith more features in the future. On mine they added a few digital effects and the ability to handle another few hundred MIDI voices.