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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."
Nothing new, I've been doing that since Windows 3.11! :)
I was just going to hire really crazy programmers, and change their meds based on what I needed.
... I type in random characters in Google and hit "I feel Lucky".
Skynet is being born!! .. or not!!
But I like the idea of logically flexible computers, and fear it at the same time. Sometimes, especially after work, it's nice to come home to something that can think in a straight line.
Google was no help...in translating this article into English.
sarchasm: The gulf between the author of sarcastic wit and the person who doesn't get it.
I first read that as Catholic Computing.
Pearly Gate logic will have to wait a few years yet, I guess.
Check out the date of the article - April 1st...
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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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.
Dr. Ditto
Wait...Rush Limbaugh has a Ph.D?
I have discovered a truly marvelous
i think this paragraph really sums things up. the editor is such a moron as to explicitly state the obvious grammatical correlation between mathematically chaotic logic circuits and the general "chaos" users experience with their computers. and that preceded by a description that sounds like some kind of vampirian (or is it vampirical?), frankensteinian, technological monster. (rob zombie brings you "attack of the chaotic leech borgs"!).
p.s. the chaotic leech borgs would be a good name for a band
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)
Reading this article reminds me of the Improbability Drive in the Hitch Hikers Guide to the Galaxy.
The last problem to be solved was to find a perfect source of randomness, which the galaxies best professors had been trying to solve for decades as whole departments had been built up on trying to solve this problem. Then one day, a brilliant student solves the problem by realizing a a cup of hot coffee provides this data. He is immediately awarded the highest Physics prize in the universe, and immediately lynched by his peers for being a smart-ass.
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 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.
The only thing I want to know is; are these computers Chaotic Lawful, Chaotic Neutral, or Chaotic Evil?
I hear there's rumors on the Slashdots
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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...adding a good/evil axis to computer alignment. Because otherwise, if you get a chaotic computer, how do you know whether it's chaotic good, chaotic neutral, or chaotic evil?
Better to have a computer with a good heart and a general distrust of authority than one which wants to enslave everyone and reduce the world to a desolate wasteland.
We're already seeing quantum computing, as this story is in two places simulataneously. Remember, you saw it here first, and second, on Slashdot.
Dude
Did you check the date on that Economist article.
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.
Yes, digital computers may use analog signals, but the basic operations of a digital computer (AND, OR, XOR, etc.) are fundamentally digital operations. They quantize the analog signals into 1s and 0s, and output quantized signals based on those digital values (of course, with some amount of analog error).
An analog computer does no such thing. If it wants to add two signals, it adds them. In analog. You can do integrals and derivations in analog as well, amongst other things.
A digital computer may have to use analog signals to operate on some level, but that does not make it an analog computer.
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".