

 A Mind Made From Memristors - yarapavan
http://hardware.slashdot.org/story/10/12/03/1953219/A-Mind-Made-From-Memristors

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kevinpet
This whole hoopla about AI using memristors seems misguided to me. Memristors
are interesting because they can more efficiently do things that currently
require collections of transisters and capacitors, but they don't have any
particular advantage in AI.

Certainly AI may benefit from some specialized neural network style hardware,
and memristors may be particularly well suited to this, but general
specialized hardware like this isn't going to give us AI that can do anything
that couldn't be done before memristors. (Unless as a pure consequence of
performance improvements.)

~~~
Benjo
IanaEE, but I am a CE:

The human brain has 10e15 synapses [1] and 2.5 petabytes of storage[2]. A
modern quad core processor has about 7e8[3] transistors.

Now the brains switches and storage probably can't be directly equated to a
processor, but presumably it is within a few orders of magnitude. A conservate
estimate would require about 10e6 times the density to get the same density as
the human brain on a chip. 10e6 ~ 2^20, so that's about 20 years assuming
Moore's Law holds.

So in terms of raw performance, we have a ways to go.

Memristors are about 10 times as dense as transistors currently [4]. They also
offer non-volatile storage in addition to processing power and the possibility
of fitting in a three dimensional structure. I won't guess what this imlies,
but I assume it's going to get us much closer to a circuit similar to a human
brain.

Am I wrong? Probably somewhere. Does any of this matter? I have no idea. We
won't know until we try. Personally, I'm VERY excited about the possibilities
behind memristors, and wish I understood them better. I can't think of a
development in the past 20 years that has more potential to advance computers.

[1] <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1920485> and
<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Human_brain>

[2] [http://www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm?id=what-is-
the...](http://www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm?id=what-is-the-memory-
capacity)

[3] <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nehalem_(microarchitecture)>

[4] <http://www.physorg.com/news156526733.html>

~~~
Someone
Following your reasoning: on the one hand adjusting for volume easily gains
three orders of magnitude.

On the other hand, there is the issue of power. The human brain takes about
the same amount of power as a top of the line quad core processor.

For now, I do not think either of these matter, though. We simply do not know
enough of how the human brain works to warrant attempting to build one.
Physicists didn't start by building the LHC, either.

------
iwr
This is the original link: [http://spectrum.ieee.org/robotics/artificial-
intelligence/mo...](http://spectrum.ieee.org/robotics/artificial-
intelligence/moneta-a-mind-made-from-memristors/0)

------
frisco
Nonsense. We have no idea we're reconstructing -- the governing dynamics of
cortical, much less subcortical, interactions are still nearly totally unknown
to us -- and memristors do nothing to shed light on that. Further, neural
codes are digital and memristors are analog elements. There's no property of
memristors that makes the job of "building a brain" easier than it would
otherwise be. The point that the metaphors are closer because there's no
separation between computation and storage is missing the larger issues.

