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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!
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).
(Without contempt or disrespect) religion is a great example of how far you can get with an incomplete model. Enlightenment, which some would argue is the highest human state, is taught with nothing more than vague contradictions that hint at a different way of thinking. Most religions use similar techniques to some extent, and I suppose most education must to some degree as well.
That said, I think religion could not have come first, as it's basically a specialised educational system. Besides, you can't teach religion before you teach words, objects, etc.
AI needs new algorithms to progress. Electronics will not change the way we program computers. They are already Turing complete, a new component adds nothing to the realm of what a device can compute. Expect a revolution in electronics, but IT people will not see a single difference (except maybe a slight performance improvement)
The Wise adapts himself to the world. The Fool adapts the world to himself. Therefore, all progress depends on the Fool.
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...
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Old designs were not fully explored, ie: Turing's 'intelligent or trainable' machines. This kind of electronics can do those old concepts viable, that's IMO the NEXT BIG THING, not just algorithms (looped circuitry is not hard to simulate, is hard to predict).
The Von newman architecture of our 'computers' was just one possibility, not the only or the best, just the convenient. New hardware processing habilities, could lead to new kinds of maybe not 'programable' in the current sense of the word, but 'trainable' machinery.
What's in a sig?
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.
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.
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."
I stand corrected and withdraw my GP comment!
You just got troll'd!
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.
No. I don't think the solution will be algorithms running on existing digital electronics.
Our brain is an analog machine. Its plasticitiy is not limited to two discrete states. Therefore, the 'software running on hardware' model for how intelligence works is not the most efficient explanation. Our brains operate the way they do because of they way they are organized, not because they are programmed in the sense we usually understand it. To put it another way, the software 'instructions' (algorithm) and the information processing(the processor) are really the same component in our intelligent machine. The mind is not software running on the brain - it *is* the brain.
In my opinion, the first artificial mind will be structured in a similar way, not in the processor-memory paradigm, but in the 'learning circuit' model. This is so because we have 'prior art' (from nature) that demonstrates that this already works for creating an intelligent machine - us.