At 800 degrees C
This is definitely the "in mice" of materials science.
Solid state batteries, hydrocarbon fuel cells etc. all work - at high temperatures.
Memristor Breakthrough: First Single Device to Act Like a Neuron
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Re: Memristor Breakthrough: First Single Device to Act Like a Neuron
#12Earlier quoted context omitted.
Can we make AI computers for Venus surface use now?
It's actually still too cold there for them to work.
Venus seems sufficient: https://solarsystem.nasa.gov/resources/681/solar-system-temp...
Re: Memristor Breakthrough: First Single Device to Act Like a Neuron
#13For neural networks, it makes sense to skip pure digital design. When I learned how to design an ALU to say, add, and wait for the propagation of carry bits that’s like O(n) where n is the number of bits in the number, it made me want to just use superposition for addition, which is physical and instantaneous. Of course, that has all sorts of other problems that make it worse (so much worse). Once you learn how to sl…
This runs into the problem that the power efficiency of analogue circuitry is dramatically worse. A FET dissipates the least heat when it's fully on or fully off. Operating in the resistive regime will result in orders of magnitude more dissipation.
It's difficult to over-come that, particularly because it's not a comparison between 'analogue v 64-bit float', but 'analogue versus 8-bit int'. (it's tough for scale analogue circuits to operate even when 8-bit accuracy).
Re: Memristor Breakthrough: First Single Device to Act Like a Neuron
#14Re: Memristor Breakthrough: First Single Device to Act Like a Neuron
#15Re: Memristor Breakthrough: First Single Device to Act Like a Neuron
#16This is really interesting work, but I feel like the way the article summarizes it is getting it wrong.
First Single Device To Act Like a Neuron
One thing that’s kept engineers from copying the brain’s power efficiency and quirky computational skill is the lack of an electronic device that can, all on its own, act like a neuron. It would take a special kind of device to do that, one whose behavior is more complex than any yet created.
This is just getting it wrong. Modern neural networks run as vectorized operations on a GPU. They are efficient because they do not use a single device to act like a single neuron, they can do massively parallelized work by optimizing for the hardware we have. If we had memristors, it doesn't seem like GPUs are the first thing they'd replace. More likely they would replace some sort of memory, since what makes them unique is storing information rather than performing analog operations faster.
Re: Memristor Breakthrough: First Single Device to Act Like a Neuron
#17To me, this is one the most important news items this year. I've been excited about memristors since I first heard about them, and this sounds like an excellent application.
These single device "neurons" also hints of things to come. Even larger neural nets with more efficient structures may, perhaps, cross a threshold in terms of what it can learn and express. I'm thinking Alpha Go Zero and beyond.
I believe this is only the start of this type of hardware.
Re: Memristor Breakthrough: First Single Device to Act Like a Neuron
#18This is interesting, but I'm kind of sceptical. We don't fully understand everything that's going on in a neuron well enough to say if we're replicating that behaviour or not. We don't even really know how many synapses an average neuron in the human brain has.
I think it's worth considering the hypothesis that neurons work because they have been evolving towards memristor like behavior.
Re: Memristor Breakthrough: First Single Device to Act Like a Neuron
#19To me, this is one the most important news items this year. I've been excited about memristors since I first heard about them, and this sounds like an excellent application. These single device "neurons" also hints of things to come. Even larger neural nets with more efficient structures may, perhaps, cross a threshold in terms of what it can learn and express. I'm thinking Alpha Go Zero and beyond. I believe this is…
I've heard about memristors for ... a decade? ... so I'm skeptical.
What makes "this time different"?
They were going to revolutionize the speed of data access, right? https://past.date-conference.com/proceedings-archive/2017/pd... Making them behave like neurons is a cool hack, but sort of tangential to why anyone cares about memristors.
I keep an open mind though, so if this time really is different, then that's valid. It just seems like more hype.
Re: Memristor Breakthrough: First Single Device to Act Like a Neuron
#20To me, this is one the most important news items this year. I've been excited about memristors since I first heard about them, and this sounds like an excellent application. These single device "neurons" also hints of things to come. Even larger neural nets with more efficient structures may, perhaps, cross a threshold in terms of what it can learn and express. I'm thinking Alpha Go Zero and beyond. I believe this is…
I was also very interested in memristors when I first discovered them over 10 years ago. I actually wanted to go to graduate school to work on them, but was surprisingly unlucky in finding willing advisors with funding. In fact I even personally knew one of the researchers at HP and asked about working there, and he basically told me "you should do something else with your life."
> I believe this is only the start of this type of hardware.
I agree, but I also suspect a pragmatic solution is still decades away, much like nuclear fusion. Of course I no longer follow this area closely and could be completely wrong.