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Memristor Minds, the Future of Artificial Intelligence
godlessgambler writes "Within the past couple of years, memristors have morphed from obscure jargon into one of the hottest properties in physics. They've not only been made, but their unique capabilities might revolutionize consumer electronics. More than that, though, along with completing the jigsaw of electronics, they might solve the puzzle of how nature makes that most delicate and powerful of computers — the brain."
What the hell is a memristor, you ask?
GAAH! MY PRINTER IS ON FIRE!!! PUT IT OUT! PUT IT OUT!
I, for one, welcome our artificially intelligent overlords!
Smivs on the intertubes!
That we've developed a whole industry based on an incomplete model, I wonder how things would have developed if the memristor had existed 30 years ago. Exciting times as a lot of things will be re-examined.
What was happening was this: in its pure state of repeating units of one titanium and two oxygen atoms, titanium dioxide is a semiconductor. Heat the material, though, and some of the oxygen is driven out of the structure, leaving electrically charged bubbles that make the material behave like a metal.
The memristor they've created depends on the movement of oxygen atoms to produce the memristor-like electrical behavior. Purely electrical components such as resistors, capacitors, inductors, and transistors only rely on the movement of electrons and holes to produce their electrical behavior. Why is this important? The chemical memristor is an order of magnitude slower than the theoretical electrical equivalent, which no one has been able to invent yet.
I think the memristor they've created is a great piece of technology and will certainly prove useful. However, it is like calling a rechargeable chemical battery a capacitor. While both are useful things, only one is fast enough for high speed electronics design for applications like the RAM they mentioned. On the other hand, a chemical memristor could be a flash memory killer if they can get the cost down (which I doubt to happen any time soon).
Putting "mr" in a word can lead to pronunciation difficulties, just google for words containing "mr" then exclude all abbreviations of mister to find how rarely the sequence it's used. Renaming it to "memistor" would help greatly. Also, the wikipedia page for memristor already contains a reference to memistor.
religion.
in the computer world.
The question is: will be see the result in our lives?
I really wish so, but the succes has stalled computer innovation. Thirty years ago we expected to be able to talk to our machines, now those advances can make it finally possible. Will the industry and economics be able to adapt to make it possible in our life time frames?
What's in a sig?
Citation Needed.
I was n't talking about replacing transistors with memeistsors, I'm talking about a completely different paradigm. Making neural networks using digital electronics does n't work well at all in the same way that trying to do simple operation like adding two numbers using neural networks is very difficult. The memristors we have now are just the begining, they have n't been developed nearly enough, give it 30 years and we should have something much more advanced.
What we have on our desktops today are just glorified calculators. In the future we could have digital analogue hybrid cpus, we're reaching the limits of digital cpus but we have n't even started exploring proper neural network type processors (except for ones based on digital circuits).
[The Bible]
What's needed is not a citation, it's a proof, or at least a tiny amount of evidence.
Interesting information...
The only bones I have over this is what is 'artificial' in regards to intelligence? It being that mankind has been on a mission to recreate 'itself' since day 1, and everything we do is support in that respect, there is nothing artificial at all about what we seek to fashion. We are not replicators on Kirk's tugboat, we are those who seek to become that which we cannot find, the Creator. I dunno, wasn't it Water's who mumbled something about it all making perfect sense?
to implement a proper neural network on a von neumann type architecture, it's like trying to fit a square into a circle. So the developments have been in making special processors that work closer to real neurons but still digital. Memristors allow them to get closer to the real thing. Like the article states they did n't even have the tools to test these because of their analogue nature so we're at the begining here.
The purpose here is n't to get faster hardware, a computer can add two numbers together orders of magnitude faster than a person, but try and get a computer to tell if a picture I give it is male or female or if there is even a person at all in the picture. It does n't matter how fast your hardware is your bubble sort is always going to suck vs a quick sort.
The amazing thing is that we consider individual brains to be "intelligent" when it seems pretty clear we're only intelligent as part of a social network. None of us are able to live alone, work alone, think alone. The concept of "self" is largely a deceit designed to make us more competitive, but it does not reflect reality.
So how on earth can a computer be "intelligent" until it can take part in human society, with the same motivations and incentives: collect power, knowledge, information, friends, armies, territories, children...
Artificial intelligence already exists and it's called the Internet: it's a technology that amplifies our existing collective intelligence, by letting us connect to more people, faster, cheaper, than ever before.
The idea that computers can become intelligent independently and in parallel with this real global AI is insane, and it has always been. Computers are already part of our AI.
Actually, the telegraph was already a global AI tool.
But, whatever, boys with toys...
My blog
but on the other hand a neuron works with electrochemical signaling and the design seems to be quite good :)
Transistors are naturally analog, it's only that we force them to be digital. If we are prepared to accept more probabilistic outputs then there are massive gains to be had http://www.electronista.com/articles/09/02/08/rice.university.pcmos/. Work is being done with analog computing too.
I think memristors will be complimentary to existing rather than a revolution on their own yet analog transistors would have George Boole flip-flopping between orientations in his grave.
After logging in slashdot still does not take you back to the page you were on. It's been that way for 20 years.
In the 1970's, the big breakthrough was supposedly tunnel diodes, a simpler and smaller circuit element than the transistor. Do our gadgets now run on tunnel diodes? Doesn't look like it to me.
If brain were indeed made of memoristors and these had finite write cycles, could it be that once we have reached these write cycles, the memoristors stop of being any use. Ofcourse the brain would try to minimise dmage to memoristors by spreading the data around but you will eventually reach a limit and eventually the same memoristors would be overwritten again and again, until eventually you start reaching the write limit for some of these, which might explain why we start losing memory after reaching 30s or so.
I suppose the way to check it, potentially, would be to see if people who have impaired senses (e.g. someone who is deaf or dumb etc.) show better brain functions in older age, as they didn't have that much data to store as someone who was getting data from all the senses.
What's under yellowstone?
... don't we have enough people producing this already?
Effectively Turing complete within a certain range of speeds and requirements for state memory.
But the tape is finite.
So, yes, glorified calculating machines. (The boundary between is not as clearly defined as you assert.)
Computer memory is just fancy paper, CPUs just fancy pens with fancy erasers; the 'net is just a fancy backyard fence.
Adam and Eve.
Or, if you don't get the reference, us.
Humans have been doing this as far back as there have been humans. It is one of the things which sets us apart from the other animals. Or, it might be argued that this is just another way of looking at the only thing that separates us from the other animals.
Computer memory is just fancy paper, CPUs just fancy pens with fancy erasers; the 'net is just a fancy backyard fence.
Some people believe that, in true religion, enlightenment is the realization of a rational basis to existence.
That is, half of enlightenment is the realization of the rational basis, and the other half is the realization that mortality pushes that rational basis ultimately beyond (mortal) human reach.
There seems to be some division as to whether giving up on understanding is preferred, since mortality is an absolute limit.
And there seems to be some further division as to whether mortality is really an absolute limit.
(And I see a metaphor here in the infinite tape of a Turing machine.)
Computer memory is just fancy paper, CPUs just fancy pens with fancy erasers; the 'net is just a fancy backyard fence.
What a stupid engineers they were, designing ever improving memory chips for half a century and not knowing they should call them "memristors". Memristors, memristors, memristors... That's what's inside your RAM, HD, flash, all thanks to Chua ! :-)
K.L.M.
Not until we have infinite tape and infinite time to process the tape are our computers truly Turing complete.
Moore boasted that technology would always be giving us just enough more tape. I'm not so sure we should worship technology, but so far the tech has stayed a little ahead of the average need.
Anyway, this new tech may provide a way to extend the curve just a little bit further, keep our machines effectively Turing complete for the average user for another decade or so.
Or not. If Microsoft goes down, the average user may soon realize he has been seriously duped about computational needs.
Computer memory is just fancy paper, CPUs just fancy pens with fancy erasers; the 'net is just a fancy backyard fence.
Woops. Posted this below in the wrong sub-thread. Oh, well, post it here, too, with this mea culpa.
Not until we have infinite tape and infinite time to process the tape are our computers truly Turing complete.
Moore boasted that technology would always be giving us just enough more tape. I'm not so sure we should worship technology, but so far the tech has stayed a little ahead of the average need.
Anyway, this new tech may provide a way to extend the curve just a little bit further, keep our machines effectively Turing complete for the average user for another decade or so.
Or not. If Microsoft goes down, the average user may soon realize he has been seriously duped about computational needs.
Computer memory is just fancy paper, CPUs just fancy pens with fancy erasers; the 'net is just a fancy backyard fence.
Meant that in response to this.
Computer memory is just fancy paper, CPUs just fancy pens with fancy erasers; the 'net is just a fancy backyard fence.
Kludge a lot of state machines together and you can simulate stack machines to a certain limit.
Kludge a lot of context free grammars together and you can simulate a context-sensitive grammar within certain limits. But it takes infinite stack, or, rather, infinite memory to actually build a context-sensitive grammar out of a bunch of context-free grammar implementations.
Intelligence is at least at the level one step beyond -- unrestricted grammar.
(Yeah, I'm saying we seem to have infinite tape and infinite stack, even though mortality is a little hard to see beyond.)
Computer memory is just fancy paper, CPUs just fancy pens with fancy erasers; the 'net is just a fancy backyard fence.
Therefore, a device which requires effectively no power to keep in one of two states, and has much greater speed than either flash or magnetic domains would be a step forward compared to the current state of the art.
From scarped cliff or quarried stone she cries "A thousand types are gone, I care for nothing, no not one."
Citation.
See especially points
6 - No hardware/software distinction can be made with respect to the brain or mind,
7 - Synapses are far more complex than electrical logic gates,
10 - Brains have bodies,
and the bonus - The brain is much, much bigger than any [current] computer.
It's past time for this idea to die.
Your brain is not a computer.
--
AI Feed @ Feed Distiller
The old idea that brain cells are lost and new ones don't form has turned out to be just plain wrong. The evidence is that the more you think about a subject, the bigger relevant parts of the brain get. For instance, London cab drivers have to memorise large chunks of the road system to pass a test, and it has been shown that the relevant part of the brain does actually grow during the process.
From scarped cliff or quarried stone she cries "A thousand types are gone, I care for nothing, no not one."
One of the more important points in the article on the memresistor is that the memresistor looks like a good candidate towards a change in architecture that has a greater density than silicone provides and I might add potentially greater speed due to the smaller component size. This new memresistor architecture offers the possibility of building a new artificial brain to study the interaction of the brain's neurons. An interesting application of current technology for provoking neuron interaction is Creator Studio creative thinking software http://www.compxpressinc.com
Yes. That's how we learn 99+ % of our words. And most of the grammar. And all of how to interpret visual stimuli. And our motor control. And 99.99+ % of the world knowledge we finally end up with. Learning (by pull) is Constructionist. Getting taught (by push) is Instructionist. The latter is severely overvalued; the former is what Montessori and other successful schools use. We used to think "The student is an empty vessel to be filled with knowledge". Today we can blame most of the problems with our public school system on the refusal to drop this misconception.
The bible is a very heavily peer reviewed document. It is an excellent example of the problems with peer review as a proxy for veracity.
Nobody tried to develop the Global Climate Model on ENIAC - it wasn't even conceivable to run a brute force iterative differential equation grid for global climate modeling on such puny hardware. The compute capacity of the brain of a dog dwarfs the biggest supercomputers on the planet. The algorithms for real intelligence can't even begin to run on the hardware we have now; they're likely to involve brute force iterative search, pattern matching, and blind association at a scale and speed that even google doesn't contemplate. Until the hardware arrives, we can't develop the algorithms; there's no way to test them. It may be that simply combining and scaling up the algorithms we know about now will get us a lot of the way there, but without a computer to run the program on, preferably linked to a physical or virtual body that can explore a world and learn about it, there's no way to know.
The other thing about AI is that it will be a by-product of Moore's law, not a goal thereof. Even if the googleplex or ASCI RED has the raw hardware capacity for some level of thought, nobody will dedicate that kind of hardware to developing an AI with the general intelligence of a person; it's a lot easier to just hire a person. We will see general AI developed when the requisite hardware is cheap enough for small research teams. AI will have economic significance only when it can run on hardware cheap enough to mass market - when a businessman can buy or lease a generally intelligent robot for maybe the price of a car, it will make sense to do so instead of hiring semi-skilled muscle-labor. Such economic breakeven will probably lag small-team development feasibility by a decade or so. Hopefully this will happen by the time when the worlds population starts seriously aging, to provide the labor the economy needs without the horrible ecological and standard-of-living impacts of continuing to grow the global population. Though robots use energy to operate, the environmental footprint of a robot is a tiny fraction of that of a person. When a robot isn't doing its job, it's sitting in its garage switched off. It doesn't buy a flat screen TV and fly to Hawaii for vacation and compete with you in the housing market and have children who join gangs and require increased taxes to educate. Eventually, when the global demographic peak is reached and most humans are old and middle class, robots will be needed to collect the garbage and pick strawberries and help incontinent old people onto the toilet.
As for Skynet, that's bullshit. AI will do what we tell it to, because that's what we'll program it to do. Just like we do what we were programmed to do (reproduce and eat), at a deep biological and cultural level, by the process that created us. The process that will create AI, commercial and government research, has no incentive to program robots to rise up against humanity, and strong incentives (lawsuits, elections) to program safeguards against rogue behavior. Military killbots will be the safest of all, because there's nothing the military values more than obedience to the chain of command, and they're already paranoid about software safety (read up on mil std 2167 some time). There will be screwups, just like with every new technology, and we'll fix them and move on. Rogue AI is a popular antagonist in fiction these days because writers can use it as the heavy without offending any socioethnic interest groups, and because robots don't scream or bleed, which allows for the kind of consequence-free "happy violence" we like in our entertainment these days. Nobody with any sense really believes robots are going to give a shit about taking over the world and killing us, or that they would really be able to, given the logistical dependence they are going to have on systems we control like oh, say, the power grid.
put them toger, and there u have real AI
if each core2 or atom cpu could be placed in a small USB stick for $5, then one can build the biggest usb chain with 1000s of $5 usb cpu sticks.
What we need is any easy was as easy as usb sticks to increase cpu horse power of desktops, without the need for cumversome sockets+fans+sinks. Maybe if each USb stick contained 256 x Z80 cpus, each running at 500mhz, at 500ma, then we could easily allow the freedom to grow. And if we could make multi layer cpus, ie say 100 layers of 256 cpus, that would be some advance. Perhaps we should strive for more quantity of simpler CPUs at optimum mhz speeds. The old 68k cpu was powerful even at 7mhz. Now that same design cpu can be made to run easily at low voltage and at 500mhz easily, but rather than 1, we could have 256 of them, which would be no more complex at 45nm than an atom cpu. GPU style.
Liberty freedom are no1, not dicks in suits.