Researchers Want To Turn Your Entire House Into a Co-Processor Using the Local Wi-Fi Signal (arstechnica.com)

An anonymous reader shares an excerpt from a report via Ars Technica: Researchers are proposing an idea to make your computer bigger. They are suggesting an extreme and awesome form of co-processing. They want to turn your entire house into a co-processor using the local Wi-Fi signal. Why, you may be asking, do we even want to do this in the first place? The real answer is to see if we can. But the answer given to funding agencies is thermal management. In a modern processor, if all the transistors were working all the time, it would be impossible to keep the chip cool. Instead, portions of the chip are put to sleep, even if that might mean slowing up a computation. But if, like we do with video cards, we farm out a large portion of certain calculations to a separate device, we might be able to make better use of the available silicon.

So, how do you compute with Wi-Fi in your bedroom? The basic premise is that waves already perform computations as they mix with each other, it's just that those computations are random unless we make some effort to control them. When two waves overlap, we measure the combination of the two: the amplitude of one wave is added to the amplitude of the other. Depending on the history of the two waves, one may have a negative amplitude, while the other may have a positive amplitude, allowing for simple computation. The idea here is to control the path that each wave takes so that, when they're added together, they perform the exact computation that we want them to. The classic example is the Fourier transform. A Fourier transform takes an object and breaks it down into a set of waves. If these waves are added together, the object is rebuilt. You can see an example of this in the animation here.

Comments

For the record...

[Anonymous Coward]

Whoever wrote this proposal is dumb as fuck

Geniuses. The people who funded it, however

[raymorris]

The people who wrote this proposal got tax payers to pay their next two years expenses while they fart around with a wifi router.

The bureaucrat who approved it and the tax payers who are funding it might be dumb as fuck, however.

Re: Geniuses. The people who funded it, however

[kenh]

And just like all other science which sounds like a bullshit waste of time when it is done it may also yield some new understandings of how interacting radio signals can be used for practical purposes.

Bullshit.

What this article claims is that complex calculations (like fourier transformations) can be computed, and their results captured, based on carefully controlling the interaction of WiFi (or other RF) signals. I suppose it could be argued that this could create a form of analog computer, but the article implies that any calculation might be fair game, up to (I assume) mining crypto currency.

Bottom line, they seem to be proposing that we take several small processors, use them to carefully modulate/regulate the RF emissions of several routers to perform otherwise trivial calculations?

Bullshit.

Gee. They discovered ANALOG COMPUTERS...

[Anonymous Coward]

Analog computation is always faster than digital...

The problem though, is calibration. Analog computers precision always drift and requires yet more analog computing to try and compensate... The end result is about 4 digits of precision, on average...

Slightly better than a slide rule...