

Memristor Minds - russell
http://www.newscientist.com/article/mg20327151.600-memristor-minds-the-future-of-artificial-intelligence.html

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TrevorJ
The explanation of the inductive thought process behind the conclusion that
such a device 'should' exist is fascinating.

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anamax
It's pretty much what Maxwell was said to have done.

Trying to create taxonomies is often worthwhile. You find patterns, holes and
other interesting things when you succeed and learn more about what you don't
know when you fail.

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TrevorJ
True. For some reason, this way of thinking just isn't natural to me. It
proves to be a great problem solving approach when it is applied though.

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ableal
Last year's news, but still has to sink in. Read it, but beware exaggerations
like "electronics had no rigorous mathematical foundation", which would set
quite a few physicists and engineers spinning in their graves.

What Leon Chua rightly noted, and described, was a missing fourth _passive_
electrical (not _electronic_ ) two-terminal component. The difference is that
_electronic_ is usually associated with so-called _active_ devices. Those have
three or more terminals (e.g. vacuum valves or semiconductor transistors), and
the third terminal controls the electron flow between the others.

Given enough active devices, you can mock up practically anything. For
example, with capacitors and transistors (and a power supply), you can make an
imitation inductor - with a limited range, but good enough for an integrated
circuit when the real thing was hard to build.

The great novelty with memristors is finding a real physical basis to provide
the desired behavior in a simple, manufacturable two-terminal device.

P.S. The A.I./neural-network angle seems to originate with the device's
creator (Stan Williams). With all due respect, I doubt that it will have all
that much impact from that side.

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naveensundar
Improvements in hardware are a necessary condition for AI. They are not
sufficient. The other necessary conditions are algorithms (correct and
efficient). The latter is much much more difficult. That is the biggest
bottleneck in AI not hardware.

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aarongough
Wow. This whole article is intensely fascinating.

It never ceases to amaze me how we can be so certain that we have the best of
something (Neural networks) for a particular job (simulating neural activity)
and then something completely different comes along and blows it away
(Memristors).

These are the sorts of things that give me hope for our future...

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ggchappell
Nice. I particularly appreciate the concise explanation of why the memristor
was clearly a "missing" component (see paragraphs 5-7).

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radu_floricica
Anything new over the last year article?

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ntownsend
I think I missed something. What is the mechanism that causes the
slime/memristor to keep changing states after the external stimulus is
removed? I thought the memristor just remembers a voltage. After you remove
the external voltage then wouldn't the voltage across the memristor just
remember the state it was in when the last external voltage was applied?
Likewise for the slime and air.

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sp332
The memristor doesn't keep changing states. Where did you see that?

More technical: [http://arstechnica.com/hardware/news/2009/01/logic-
circuits-...](http://arstechnica.com/hardware/news/2009/01/logic-circuits-
that-program-themselves-memristors-in-action.ars)

~~~
ntownsend
Ah. I misread the NewScientist article. It wasn't clear to me that in the
experiment to mimic the slime they, in fact, modeled the slime with a circuit
that _included_ a memristor and not with just a memristor. The paper the
article cites also made things much clearer:
<http://fr.arxiv.org/abs/0810.4179>

