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'Inexact' Chips Save Power By Fudging the Math
Barence writes "Computer scientists have unveiled a computer chip that turns traditional thinking about mathematical accuracy on its head by fudging calculations. The concept works by allowing processing components — such as hardware for adding and multiplying numbers — to make a few mistakes, which means they are not working as hard, and so use less power and get through tasks more quickly. The Rice University researchers say prototypes are 15 times more efficient and could be used in some applications without having a negative effect."
Big difference between not dealing with full precision and encouraging erroneous behavior by trimming infrequently chunks of hardware.
Oh you misunderstand. It will still return the "right" answer, it'll just be "engineer" right, not "mathematician" right, i.e. "Good enough for all intents and purposes.
Furthermore, posting under the top post when your reply is nothing to do with the OP is considered a faux pas. Minus 50 DKP.
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Humans tend to do fast imprecise math to decided when to cross the street. It looks like that car won't hit me, but i can't say its going to take 4.865 seconds for it to get to the crosswalk. Estimations, even if fudged and almost completely wrong, should play a massive role in AI.
If I'm reading the article right, the chips are still deterministic, they just don't care about a few rare edge cases. So whether there is an error or not depends on the input, and in your case all four chips will make the same mistake. What you could try is modify the input a little for each rerun and try to interpolate the result from that, but that won't give you perfect accuracy.
Which is... math.
Just because something doesn't involve digits doesn't mean it's not math. I suggest you look up analogue computers, because that's what you just described - a neural net acting as an analogue computer.
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BMO