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A Mind Made From Memristors
Csiko writes "Researchers at Boston University's department of cognitive and neural systems are working on an artificial brain implemented with memristors. 'A memristor is a two-terminal device whose resistance changes depending on the amount, direction, and duration of voltage that's applied to it. But here's the really interesting thing about a memristor: Whatever its past state, or resistance, it freezes that state until another voltage is applied to change it. Maintaining that state requires no power.' Also theoretically described, solid state versions of memristors have not been implemented until recently. Now researchers in Boston claim that memristors are the new key technology to implement highly integrated, powerful artificial brains on cheap and widely available hardware within five years."
How do you read that state back without applying any voltage to it?
I look at the wikipedia page and its all greek to me.
The robot army that destroys humanity will run on these.
I have heard that artifical brains were around the corner for years. What about neural networks they were supposed to create human like brains.
This is nothing like the cognitive human brain. This is only a variable memory device.
Athiesm is a religion like not collecting stamps is a hobby.
Now that's 'Change We Can Believe In!'
He who knows best knows how little he knows. - Thomas Jefferson
I'm going to be the laziest bastard alive
Ever notice that anytime some cool sounding new development is announced the people behind it say 'we see this having applications in/within/in about five years?
Call me when you actually have something to show us.
Well, I might already be that, but someday this could make my transformation complete.
Cybernetic Lifeform Node!
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Even if the rest of the things explained in the article happen many years away, the last couple of paragraphs explain the trend:
Neuromorphic chips won't just power niche AI applications. The architectural lessons we learn here will revolutionize all future CPUs. The fact is, conventional computers will just not get significantly more powerful unless they move to a more parallel and locality-driven architecture. While neuromorphic chips will first supplement today's CPUs, soon their sheer power will overwhelm that of today's computer architectures.
The semiconductor industry's relentless push to focus on smaller and smaller transistors will soon mean transistors have higher failure rates. This year, the state of the art is 22-nanometer feature sizes. By 2018, that number will have shrunk to 12 nm, at which point atomic processes will interfere with transistor function; in other words, they will become increasingly unreliable. Companies like Intel, Hynix, and of course HP are putting a lot of resources into finding ways to rely on these unreliable future devices. Neuromorphic computation will allow that to happen on both memristors and transistors.
It won't be long until all multicore chips integrate a dense, low-power memory with their CMOS cores. It's just common sense.
Our prediction? Neuromorphic chips will eventually come in as many flavors as there are brain designs in nature: fruit fly, earthworm, rat, and human. All our chips will have brains.
Hopefully, this is the solution to 2018's problem of reaching atomic levels of miniaturization. We have a breaktrought to continue with Moore's law beyond current technology.
"Sum Ergo Cogito"
I'm sorry, Dave. I'm afraid I can't do that. ....
HAL only had JK Flip Flops
...to implement highly integrated, powerful artificial brains on cheap and widely available hardware within five years.
*snicker* Is it April 1st already Soulskill?
Don't get me wrong, this is cool research, but cheap, available, artificial brains in five years? In 2015? Color me skeptical. I say give it 25 at least.
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Pity Frank Herbert isn't still around to see the fruits of his imagination!
We already know how to make highly integrated powerful brains. It's called sex. Oh wait, this is Slashdot...
By the middle of next year, our researchers will be working with thousands of candidate animats at once, all with slight variations in their brain architectures. Playing intelligent designers, we'll cull the best ones from the bunch and keep tweaking them until they unquestionably master tasks like the water maze and other, progressively harder experiments. We'll watch each of these simulated animats interacting with its environment and evolving like a natural organism. We expect to eventually find the "cocktail" of brain areas and connections that achieves autonomous intelligent behavior. We will then incorporate those elements into a memristor-based neural-processing chip. Once that chip is manufactured, we will build it into robotic platforms that venture into the real world.
Then, once they become self-aware, we can turn Arnold Schwarzenegger loose on them.
Sometimes the light at the end of the tunnel is the headlight of an oncoming train.
http://xkcd.com/678/
There is no reason to suppose that people would not ally themselves with an artificial brain. People have already aligned themselves with Pol Pot, Idi Amin, Adolf Hitler, and Josef Stalin--allegiances with undisputedly bad people who ultimately served them very poorly. There is every reason to expect that people will form an allegiance to an artificial brain if that artificial brain causes those people to receive adequate food, shelter, and medical care.
That will be seriously weird. I can envision elections to appoint protectors of the artificial brain. If the military gets what it wants from the artificial brain, it will protect the artificial brain (and let the wars begin). The Artificial Brain will be able to forge shifting alliances with human groups that ensure its continued existence in power.
Imagine multiple corporations amassing ever more power as a consequence of direction by a superior artificial brain. That power is political power and it translates to control over people.
I WANT ASIMOV'S THREE RULES!!!!! This is scary!
Consider this. You may make fun of this for its matrix reference but hear me out. Because an artificual brain is built on rules, on parameters, it will never* function like our brain does. Even without a social upbringing we would learn creatively by our 5 senses. Because these senses are biologically innate from day 1, you can't duplicate that sensory perception and its synapses that feed the brain. Sure, we could tell it input X,Y,Z, and allow it to "learn" based on parameters, but its still a system built on walls, rules, and contained input, despite any creative output. Also take into part the concept of instincts, souls, and the fact no two brains are a like. Trying to sum up all the creativeness of every single brain on the planet is nigh impossible. Do I doubt we will be able to simulate some functions of a brain? No, but I doubt it will ever reach the biological power of the cognitive human brain. No matter what you "teach" it, it is still a processor, with parameters.
Couldn't this be used to make cheaper solid-state storage?
I write sci-fi for metalheads
So is this a step in the direction for cyberbrains or maybe internal memory storage devices for implanting in humans ?
...will it run BSD?
Why do we think we are so much smarter than those scientists on Caprica. They were much further advanced than us. Shouldn't we be learning from their mistakes instead of trying to recreate them?
When I can buy one at mouser/digikey then maybe I'd believe you can build something neat with them in 5 years.
“Did you arrange for your own beta-level to be transmitted to Zodiacal Light, Ilia? ... The beta-levels can speed up the whole negotiation process, ...
soul or no soul,,do they do what you do?
Here is why this is just yet another pipe dream: any hardware that we can build can be emulated identically in software. It will perhaps run slower, but it will do the same thing. There have been no software agents that have been modeled for the past 50 years that are anything close to 'real ai', so why would shifting the problem to hardware do anything to advance the underlying problem? Speed and transistor counts don't make up for a lack of understanding.
HA! I just wasted some of your bandwidth with a frivolous sig!
I think, therefore I'm still not sure if I am or not?
He put his boots up on the table and made a face. "The sig," he smirked. "You can waste your life in search of the sig."
This technology fundamentally mistakes what is the hard part about building brains as adaptable as biological ones. The physical instantiation is not important, if the Church-Turing thesis is true. (And if you're saying Church-Turing is false, that's an enormous claim and you'd better have very compelling evidence to back you up.)
The hard part about building a brain is figuring out the patterns of connectivity between neurons. Biology solves this in some brilliant way, starting from a seed with almost no information (the genome) and implementing some process to incorporate environmental data, self-organizing into a very robust and complex structure with orders of magnitude more information. The great unknown is the process whereby this growth and self-organization occurs. Figure that out, and you'll be able to make any kind of computer you like function as a brain.
We are not the individual static ideas we think, we are the movement from idea to idea...
Ideas are made of energy and therefore exist.
The movement can be perceived as opposites (last idea/next idea), relative waves (series of ideas) etc.
To understand more about life, one would endeavor to study movement.
Dave Matthews SR.
Comment removed based on user account deletion
LMFTFY: Why does consciousness experience you?
I strongly agree with this post regarding soul and the question of where is the observer who is me? It is a challenge to proponents of strong AI and the Singularity.
I recently attended an Open house at IBM Almaden where their roadmap with DARPA on a memresistor "brain" was laid out. After the presentation I turned to Sr IBM researcher and said " I have a big problem with this approach.". He replied " yeh... How do you program the thing!"
Each human brain's trillion trillion web of connections is unique and was formed over years of training and experience... Childhood. You can't copy any individuals connections into a new matrix, and we are a long ways away from giving memresitor chips childhoods.
Let alone souls..
"Knowing everything doesn't help..."
I think we could clone Bruce Lee by feeding his all documentaries into one of these memresistor brains, and then all learn from the master.
woah.
Bruce Lee left a great legacy in his documentaries. If we can use this technology to reincarnate the master; we can all learn from his movements.
The master could reach down your throat, pull out your heart and show it to you while it was still beating. He was that fast.
kinda feel like pizza.
it doesnt matter if your logic gates are made out of gears, tubes, transistors, memristors or pecking pigeons - if they satisfy the rules of logic -- AND, OR, NOT, and NAND -- then the qualities of the underlying hardware are abstracted from logical functioning, and are thus irrelevant to the qualities they claim in the article that machines constructed out of these components will posses -- this article is nothing more than more pie in the sky -- promising a magical change that results in self-aware qualities, simply because we make our logic circuits out of memristors instead of transistors or pigeons.. yes; i've heard this one before.. twenty years of hypberbole. :-P :-P
wake me up when they make a machine as smart as a slug (without borrowing bits of slug to do it).
I didn't see anything in that article about how memristors will significantly (ie: exponentially) enable better approximations of K(x) (where K is the representation of x that takes minimum bits). Nor should one expect that something as far removed from the hard work of modeling would significantly enhance intelligence.
So, who is being scammed this time?
Seastead this.
We can comprehend what it's like to alter our consciousness, my good friend - we do it all the time.
We don't need to look at "reprogramming", just go see the local "stage hypnotist" for a first-hand view of what your consciousness constitutes. It's a pretty nebulous beast.
It amounts to a convenient fabrication, our personal construct of what we consider reality to be, not quite an illusion, but not exactly "empirical" either. The stage hypnotist assists people to reconstruct their personal realities more-or-less arbitrarily. The subjects, or victims for our amusement, are convinced of their new realities. One might argue that their "normal" consciousness has ceased to exist (or gone to sleep or whatever you find convenient) and a new one has taken (temporary) hold of the organism.
Taken another look at hallucinogenics - you alter your consciousness deliberately when you drop acid. Or at least, you could say that you alter it faster than with a strong joint, which in turn is simply faster than meditation.
There's nothing scary about changing one's consciousness - we do it constantly, and aren't even aware.
What do you think "I changed my mind" really means?
A good brain for a domestic housekeeping robot!
Tsukasa: All I really want, is to be left alone...
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Fair enough. Only geeks find this sort of stuff fascinating.
Agreed with GreatBunzinni.... to Mysticalfruit: your dumbass brain will be even dumber in 5 years, so pray that MoNETA really comes to fruition otherwise you will be homeless
Man is a highly advanced technological marvel with data processing capabilities far beyond any man made machine. We have self replicating ability akin to a virus, we have the ability to download and store information much like a HDD. We learn through input, the more information we feed on the more efficient the machine we become. We are now in a trend where we are de-evolving technologically. Actually discovering inferior technologies to compensate for the flaws that we as superior tech are hardcoded with. Like our inability to cheat death, and our inability to keep our system from degrading. Life compensates for this by allowing us to transfer our most vital information through DNA adding information along the way. This isnt good enough for us. We, unlike most computers, have the ability to overcome obstacles set in our path. One could argue that this is a preprogrammed skill set. Much like a complex computer application which is designed to react depending on the external stimulae.. I dont prescribe to the soul idea. I do believe however that man is just a shell like a PC case to house all the data we harvest. I dont know what happens when the physical body dies but I would suspect that the pure information we are composed off exists in some form or another.
When you dislike the human race as much as I do, Karma:Bad is inevitable lol.
We should buy him a bulletproof vest before it is too late.
This entire article reminds me of that crackpot researcher Hugo de Garis, who wanted to build an artificial cat brain about a decade ago. I don't understand that people or organizations like DARPA still fall for this. Let me spell it out:
It makes NO SENSE to try to build / simulate a human or cat brain if you don't understand its underpinnings. The 'magic' of the brain is not in the neurons, it's in the wiring. Until we understand how a simple brain (like that of an ant) works we shouldn't be trying to build a more complex brain and hope it will magically start working when we flip the switch.
You have no idea of what you are talking about. Get a degree, read a few neuroscience, computational neuroscience, robotics papers, and then read the article again, you might learn something. You are still in the stoneage
Great article. There is a blog called Neurdon (www.neurdon.com) that has more info on memristors and the project
http://tech.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=1891254&cid=34413838 TheEndOfDays likes stalking and trolling others (as well as starting it up as shown right there)? I like how he was put into his rightful place here in the end http://tech.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=1891254&cid=34418274 where TheEndOfDays ran like the trolling little coward he really is, unable to back up his trolling and stalking crap. TheEndofDays, it seems that You like starting up hassles, but in the end, you always "eat it". You're also too lazy and ignorant to volunteer to do anything, other than being caught trolling and stalking others here as you were in the URL above, clearly.