DARPA's Latest Chip Is Designed To Be Bad At Arithmetic (technologyreview.com)

Reader holy_calamity writes: Pentagon research agency DARPA has funded the creation of a chip incapable of correct arithmetic, in the hope of making computers better at understanding the real world. A chip that can't guarantee that every calculation is perfect can still get good results on many problems but needs fewer circuits and burns less energy, says Joseph Bates, cofounder and CEO of Singular Computing. The S1 chip can process noisy data like video very efficiently because it doesn't need the extra circuits or operations needed to ensure every mathematical operation is performed perfectly. This summer DARPA will put five prototype computers, each equipped with 16 of the inexact S1 chips, online for researchers to experiment with.

Comments

Re:Simple Solution

[Pfhorrest]

There's no way in hell you're old enough to have kids in college and yet you had Common Core homework yourself. The standard development didn't begin until 2009, the report calling for standards wasn't even issued until 2004, and the organization that issued that report didn't exist until 1996. Maybe you were still in school 20 years ago and have 20-ish kids in college now, but Common Core was barely a twinkle some people's eyes back then.