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."

Comments

Not chaotic?

[Rkane]

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?

But is it easy to work with?

[Chief Technovelgist]

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."

Kinda sorta.

[blair1q]

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.

chaotic? i don't think so...

[Sebastopol]

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...