IBM unveils computer fed by 'electronic blood'

More info here: http://www.research.ibm.com/cognitive-computing/neurosynapti...

Oddly enough, the military will be the first customer for a one petaflop computer for tactical and strategic scenarios/simulations, which will no doubt include WWIII type situations.

For the near future, it will almost certainly be used to comply with the moratorium on nuclear testing.

Over the last ~20 years many of the biggest supercomputers on the TOP500 list were purchased to run simulations of the aging US nuclear stockpile to answer maintenance questions that formerly required active testing.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Accelerated_Strategic_Computin...

Definitely not unexplored territory, analog computation came first. Notably, the way you program an (electronic) analog computer is by adjusting it's circuitry.. not exactly the friendliest programming model.

The problem with noise seems to be repeatability. Enough noise, and reliability becomes a huge problem. With same inputs and analog circuit, you want the same answer every time, don't you?

You cannot "overcome this noise" by removing it. The perfection of materials, process and environment required for that would be on the order of an experiment like this: https://www.simonsfoundation.org/quanta/20131010-neutrino-ex...

We overcame the noise via digitization. In fact, there is obviously still noise in our current digital computers, since the components within them are fundamentally analog, but digital circuits quantize the analog signals, interpreting the 1's and 0's, despite their analog nature. (this is simplified and I know next to nothing about digital circuit design)

This article was not written for any one who has even an average understanding of the subject. It is there to give the most simple, general over view of an interesting development. It is not supposed to be anything more than that. It is there for shelf stackers, van drivers, policemen, accountants, solicitors, carpenters, mechanics, in fact, any one but people with any clue to start with. People with a clue are doing themselves down by reading it in the first place. They should already know all about it, and not be blind sided by a BBC piece.

No, the person who wrote it is not clueless, they have written it for the clueless.

And that, is absolutely NOT a value judgement on the "clueless".

The vast majority of people very understandably do not have any clue about this niche science. Why on earth should they? After all, does being a whiz with Java or something suddenly mean this should even begin to have any understanding of this? Why should it? So why should a brick layer have any idea at all? All the average "clueless" want is a very, very basic over view, such that they can essentially say, "oh wow, that's cool. Oi Dave, look at this". And if they are even slightly inspired, they would go off and drill down to the proper scientific detail else where, using something revolutionary like Google.

If you want any more than that, then I'm sorry, its not the remit of the BBC. And no body even close to knowing the basics of this sort stuff would be getting their information from the BBC. Like I have said, they will already be very clued up, right? And one in the middle will not even read the article fully. They will get enough information to go to a more thorough source.

I get really frustrated with people who seem clueless themselves about what the BBC is there for, and who articles like this are aimed at. It is always easy for some expert to slag off BBC articles, in the way you have, when they were never ever written to stand up to peer review or some such high standard. I imagine an "expert" could easily pick holes in literally every single article the BBC has ever published.

What is really depressing is that you have obviously read enough to be interested. But instead of being interested enough to search for more information, you come here to lay in to the author. Is it really that much easier to complain than research? Does the BBC have to spoon feed every one, on every subject, at every level? No. Its a broadcaster, not a collection of all the worlds best universities. The let you peek in, the rest is up to you.