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'Memtransistor' Brings World Closer To Brain-Like Computing
the gmr writes: According to a recent article published in the journal Nature, researchers at Northwestern University's McCormick School of Engineering have developed a "memtransistor," a device that both stores information in memory and processes information. The combined transistor and memory resistor work more like a neuron and purports to make computing more brain-like. The new "memtransistor" would use less energy than digital computers and eliminate the need to run memory and processing as separate functions while also being more brain-like. Lead researcher Mark C. Hersam clarified the brain-like efficacy of the memtransistor: "...in the brain, we don't usually have one neuron connected to only one other neuron. Instead, one neuron is connected to multiple other neurons to form a network. Our device structure allows multiple contacts, which is similar to the multiple synapses in neurons... [but] making dozens of devices, as we have done in our paper, is different than making a billion, which is done with conventional transistor technology today." Hersam reported no barriers to scaling up to billions of devices. This new technology would make smart devices more capable and possibly more seemingly-human. The devices may also promote advances in neural networks and brain-computer interfaces, new technologies also recently reported at Futurism.
I recommend checking out e.g. Wikipedia's summary of the theoretical motivation behind them. It's not just about making "computers more like brains", it's rather that memristors are the fourth passive electronic component (the first three being the resistor, capacitor, and inductor). Once we've got a full set of passive electronic components, perhaps a lot of circuits that today have to be built using active components (transistors, op-amps, etc.) could be replaced by smaller and more efficient passive equivalents.
Timeouts, pages hanging... 40x/50x status codes ...what's the deal?
Whole website is dog slow and seems to be getting worse. Not that management cares, but this is usually what precedes a total failure.
Anybody seen this too?
And immediately, 100 million programmers skills were rendered obsolete
Could you fit enough Memtransistors in Arnold's brain to make a Terminator?
Everything in this piece is speculative. I can make shit up too, it doesn't mean I'm on the verge of cracking quantum computing. The best way to speculate is to look at what is being implemented now and imagine it being slightly more sophisticated. Seldom if ever, apart from perhaps splitting the atom, are advances of this kind of such sudden magnitude. I doubt very much this will be any exception.
I have the distinct impression that the above jibberish spew was composed by a buzz word compliant hidden markov model.
Some drink at the fountain of knowledge. Others just gargle.
Announced by Hewlett-Packard with great PR fanfare ten years ago. Intermittent bursts of PR fluff since then. Has anything shipped in actual products?
Nobody knows how the brain works. In fact, the closer we look and the more we know, the more mysterious its workings become. Claiming to bring anything "closer" to its working is a direct lie.
Most ACs are not even worth the keystrokes to insult them. Be generically insulted by this and ignored otherwise.
Does no one remember the lessons learned by the Butlerian Jihad?
How is this different than HPs memristor from a decade ago?
CyberDyne Systems announces their new "Neural Net CPU". Based on recent breakthroughs of quantum computing and memtransistors, the combination of these technologies promises "many more computations can be done each second, quadrillions of switching positions are possible, many of them simultaneous at each quantum level."
using that term repeatedly makes me feel, maybe we need a new synonym to describe 'brain-like' functions?
Why do we keep reading about "breakthroughs" getting us closer to brain-like computing?
Companies are replacing employees with computers and robots because what they provide is *better*.
Not once in the history of computing has anyone heard a CEO say "these computers / robots are great, but I just wish they were making more mistakes, being lazy, going on strikes and wasting their time posting on Slashdot".
We have a pretty good idea of how neurons work and behave individually and also some brain components are understood up to a point - eg visual system which has allowed some pretty good advances in artificial neural networks. However how individual systems in the brain link up and produce a conciousness - the ghost in the machine - is still frankly anyones guess. There are lots of idea but nobody really has a clue yet.
Another millimeter in a race the distance of which we have yet to understand?
You clearly never red Von Fredircks fifth postulate of public discourse, please read Willhems essayist, and rodgers publik speaking and it's effect on reason, or sargentzi's Das Discobolus in the original German before you recommend better educations to people ob slashdot.
Some drink at the fountain of knowledge. Others just gargle.
I am a nanotechnologist, and this is the BS typical of our field.
The effect they're looking at is reversibly changing the gate properties of the transistor by carefully spiking the voltage on one input. This is something you can do with a silicon transistor; the magnitude and reproducibility of the effect is driven by the defect density and thickness of the gate oxide. It's temperature dependent, atmosphere dependent... all this stuff is very scientifically interesting, there are a lot of papers and PhD theses you can write on this.
15 years ago, we saw this same effect in carbon nanotube transistors, and it was my turn to get excited about moving defects around to create and tune unusual transistor properties.
Mark Hersam, the lead author of this work, knows all this stuff. He knows memristor (and memtransistor) research goes back decades further than HP in the early 2000s. His abstract contains some of those references.
What we've always lacked and are still lacking here is some basic understanding of how this fits into the real world. How does this fit into any sort of system? What does "scalable fabrication" of (whatever nanotech device) actually require?
In nanotechnology, we have become truly excellent at producing bespoke devices with exotic materials and designs, but we (as a field and as individuals) have shockingly poor grasp of the problems we're supposed to be solving as well as the actual manufacturing processes we'll need to fit in to.
At the end of his abstract, Hersam suggests that the best use of his device design is to study defects in nanomaterials. This is a great example of the circular logic that has held nanotechnology back for 30 years.
I don't think you read it. this is a multi-terminal device.
And why is this any less of a dead end than the rest of the memristor research field?