

Brain-like, massively parallel computer made from organic molecules - mrsebastian
http://www.extremetech.com/extreme/102187-scientists-create-brain-like-massively-parallel-computer-from-molecules?1

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Groxx
Why the addition of "organic" in the title? or was it removed from the
article? I mean, yeah, they're organic molecules: they have carbon in them[1].
So what?

Very neat results, though I note no mention of re-use of the circuits. Anyone
know if this is a one-shot deal, or if it's possible to make a general-purpose
CPU out of this technique?

edit: the research paper seems to imply the states are all mutable, which
suggests to me that this is a very short step away from re-programmable
circuits. Awesome. This could get interesting quickly, if there's an easy way
to make the circuits in the first place.

[1]: <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Organic_molecule>

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Cushman
Every time I read an article like this, it makes me a little depressed that
I'm still writing code for traditional computer architectures instead of
inventing new ones.

~~~
commieneko
I can remember, what 20, no, 30 years ago, when the Connection Machine was
going to be the harbinger of a new class of computers. We were all going to
have to learn to deal with massively parallel programming.

And then I never heard of it again until years later this
([http://longnow.org/essays/richard-feynman-and-connection-
mac...](http://longnow.org/essays/richard-feynman-and-connection-machine/))
article about Richard Feynman popped up on the internet.

I still don't know why the CM never went anywhere. Inertia, scaling
limitations, grabbed by the spooks and now only used by NSA for reading my
email?

~~~
rst
Politics --- literally. The CM's market niche was high-end research, and most
of the sales there were to labs and projects funded by ARPA (or DARPA; the D
comes and goes). This led to accusations from competitors that [D]ARPA was
steering the labs to the CM, which got a sympathetic ear in Congress --- and
all of a sudden, the CM was completely unacceptable to [D]ARPA.

(Accounts of this vary; as an ex-employee and friend of many who remained
during this period, the technical staff certainly believed that they were
winning those sales with a better product, but those at, say, Kendall Square
Research almost certainly believed the opposite, in good faith.)

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haliax
This may or may not be some seriously cool materials science, but
parallelizing a cellular automaton is trivial (as cells change state based on
local interactions) and has been done with conventional hardware already, as
has the construction of systems that change their own wiring in response to
experience.

~~~
dman
I know very little about the field and would appreciate if you provided some
pointers.

~~~
haliax
Which field? Materials Science? Parallelizing CAs?

~~~
dman
Parallelizing CAs.

~~~
haliax
A Cellular Automaton is inherently parallelizable because the state of any
given cell at time t+1 can be computed from nothing more than the the state of
its neighbors at time t, see
[http://www.cs.ox.ac.uk/geraint.jones/publications/book/Pio2/...](http://www.cs.ox.ac.uk/geraint.jones/publications/book/Pio2/life.ps)

~~~
dman
thanks

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gjm11
Brain, n. A massively parallel brain-like computer made from organic
molecules.

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MadGouki
I wonder what the implications of this are in regard to Wolfram's book on
automata. Would it be possible to implement an automata computer in a system
made from this molecule?

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toisanji
any know of any other related projects to that have hardware that can be
played with/hacked?

~~~
astrobe_
GreenArrays [1] has 144 chips on a die evaluation boards. The toy is a bit
expensive, though.

[1] <http://www.greenarraychips.com/>

------
FD3SA
My bet for a brain simulator is on memristor[1] based neural networks. HP is
commercializing[2] memristor storage devices as we speak. We need economies of
scale such that memristor computing becomes cheap enough to implement
universally. Unfortunately, one off research technologies are far too
expensive to produce in the necessary quantities for AI research.

[1]
[http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=Q...](http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=QqidLTSz2nI)

[2] <http://www.hp.com/hpinfo/newsroom/press/2010/100831c.html>

