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A Brain Built From Atomic Switches Can Learn

Accepted submission by rylyeh http://reversethis-{moc.liamg} {ta} {htadak} at 2017-10-08 03:05:55 from the I Robot dept.
Hardware
From Quanta Magazine [quantamagazine.org]

Now engineering researchers at the California NanoSystems Institute [ucla.edu] at the University of California, Los Angeles, are hoping to match some of the brain’s computational and energy efficiency with systems that mirror the brain’s structure. They are building a device [plos.org], perhaps the first one, that is “inspired by the brain [quantamagazine.org] to generate the properties that enable the brain to do what it does,” according to Adam Stieg [ucla.edu], a research scientist and associate director of the institute, who leads the project with Jim Gimzewski [ucla.edu], a professor of chemistry at UCLA.

...The device is a far cry from conventional computers, which are based on minute wires imprinted on silicon chips in highly ordered patterns. The current pilot version is a 2-millimeter-by-2-millimeter mesh of silver nanowires connected by artificial synapses. Unlike silicon circuitry, with its geometric precision, this device is messy, like “a highly interconnected plate of noodles,” Stieg said. And instead of being designed, the fine structure of the UCLA device essentially organized itself out of random chemical and electrical processes.

 
Read the article: [quantamagazine.org]
 
Reminds me of Mike from Heinlein's The Moon is a Harsh Mistress! [wikipedia.org]


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