Wednesday, December 08, 2010

Squishy Memristers and Diodes.

Damn but I love this shit:

Brain-Machine Interface

Neural Networks

Squishy Memristers and Diodes


So (Ju-Hee So) says these quasi-liquid components could one day be used to build bioelectronic circuits to provide connections between living tissue and computers, such as brain-machine interfaces. "People want to put information into the brain and read information out," she says. Such an interface might, for instance, allow an amputee to control a prosthetic limb the same way he would control his real limb—with just a thought. Similar devices made with conventional technology tend to be rigid and must be encapsulated to protect the electrical circuits from the moisture inherent in biology. So believes the materials her team is working with will be compatible with human tissue. Gallium salts, for instance, are injected into people to improve the contrast in scans of human lungs, and hydrogels have many biological uses. The devices might also be used as components in artificial neural networks, an application to which memristors are already being applied in earnest.

3 comments:

Neal Asher said...

I love this bit from one of those links:

Consider Deep Blue, IBM's 1.4-ton supercomputer, which in 1997 faced then world chess champion Garry Kasparov. In prior years, Kasparov had defeated the computer's predecessors five times. After a taut series comprising one win apiece and three draws, Deep Blue finally trounced Kasparov in game six. Nevertheless, Deep Blue was not intelligent. To beat Kasparov, its special-purpose hardware used a brute-force strategy of simply calculating the value of 200 million possible chess moves each second. In the same amount of time, Kasparov could plan roughly two chess positions.

Over the next 10 years, computing capabilities skyrocketed: By 2007 the processing power of that 1.4-ton supercomputer had been contained within a Cell microprocessor roughly the size of a thumbnail. In the decade between them, transistor counts had jumped from 7.5 million on an Intel Pentium II to 234 million on the Cell.

Anonymous said...

"one day" *sad face*

wintermute said...

glad to see you like nextbigfuture, great metafilter!