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Chaotic Computing In Practice

Posted by Hemos on from the using-the-machines dept.

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."

5 of 199 comments (clear)

  1. Not chaotic? by Rkane · · Score: 4, Interesting

    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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  2. But is it easy to work with? by Chief+Technovelgist · · Score: 4, Interesting
    Sounds kind of like a quantum logic thinker, from one of Greg Bear's early books:

    "The QL is a monster to work with' he said..."It has no priorities, no real sense of needs or goals. It thinks, but it may not solve. Quantum logic can outline the center of a problem before it understands the principles and questions, and then, from our point of view, everything ends in confusion. More often than not, it comes up with a solution to a problem that is not stated. It does virtually everything but linear, time's arrow ratiocination."
  3. Kinda sorta. by blair1q · · Score: 5, Interesting

    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.

  4. chaotic? i don't think so... by Sebastopol · · Score: 4, Interesting

    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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  5. Re:1+1 = null by baudilus · · Score: 3, Interesting

    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.