Chaotic Computing In Practice 199
codyhess writes "The Economist published a great article detailing efforts to use Chaos in computing - "Speaking at the American Physical Society's annual March conference, William Ditto of the University of Florida told of his efforts to create a 'chaotic computer'."
Dr. Ditto can create standard logic gates (AND, OR, etc) that output a value according the their chaotic threshhold. Different logic operations can be performed by simply changing the threshhold, making an incredibly flexible computer that can perfom different functions instantaneously."
Chaotic Computing... (Score:5, Funny)
Re:Oh yeah?? (Score:3, Funny)
Anyone with the misfortune of reading my source... (Score:2, Funny)
Re:Anyone with the misfortune of reading my source (Score:2, Insightful)
You wish.
To protect the perpetrator I won't mention his name, but here's a warning about people developing off in a corner, by themseleves rather than collaborating with their peers.
I worked for two years at one job before learning there was another programmer (besides the other two I worked with.) The group I worked with remained within the same office or no more than a room away and we frequently bounced ideas off each other, creating some damn fine pro
Re:Anyone with the misfortune of reading my source (Score:2)
Come to embrace the dark side, have we?
Re:Anyone with the misfortune of reading my source (Score:2)
Not by the mathematical definition, or any less rigorous one.
What you're describiing is simply an organized approach which ranges more widely in the solution space. You choose to attack problems "from outside the box", yet you are just operating in a bigger box.
Calling this "chaos" is as wrong as calling that long coders approach "chaotic".
I suppose this beats my design (Score:4, Funny)
Re:I suppose this beats my design (Score:2, Funny)
When I do chaotic computing... (Score:4, Funny)
Argh! (Score:3, Insightful)
Cofee Maker Logic (Score:1)
Google was no help... (Score:5, Funny)
Obligatory D&D joke (Score:5, Funny)
The only thing I want to know is; are these computers Chaotic Lawful, Chaotic Neutral, or Chaotic Evil?
Re:Obligatory D&D joke (Score:2, Informative)
Lawful is on the same axis as Chaotic.
{ Lawful, Neutral, Chaotic }
{ Good, Neutral, Evil }
I'm a huge dork.
Re:Obligatory D&D joke (Score:2)
You are correct, Sir
I am greatly shamed ...
Re:Obligatory D&D joke (Score:3, Funny)
Woa (Score:4, Funny)
I first read that as Catholic Computing.
Pearly Gate logic will have to wait a few years yet, I guess.
Re:Woa (Score:1)
Re:Woa (Score:5, Funny)
The system has encountered an unrecoverable error and IT'S ALL YOUR FAULT. I SAW YOU pausing just a little too long before closing those suggestive webcam ads. Now go burn that copy of The Da Vinci Code, wash your eyes out with holy water after your clandestine mission to The Passion, and go out and buy a wooden yardstick to smack your fingers with every time you have an innapropriate thought.
And spit out your gum.
Re:Woa (Score:2)
Re:Woa (Score:2)
ah yes so that would be the purgatory processor ?
Not computing heaven and not quite computing hell.
April Fool? (Score:3, Informative)
Re:April Fool? (Score:2)
Re:April Fool? 'Fraid not... (Score:2)
Apparently, Dr. Ditto is something of an expert in chaos theory, and has/is applying it to more that the field of computing.
BTW, how come no knee-jerk commentary from the peanut gallery on how Dr Ditto is "outsourcing" to India? Or did the reference to his collaborator from Chennai, Sudeshna Sinha, completely escape everyone.
---anactofgod---
Re:April Fool? (Score:2, Informative)
Not chaotic? (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:Not chaotic? (Yes, you can control chaos) (Score:5, Informative)
If you map the strange attractor and nudge the system are the right point of the cycle, you can push the system into what ever mode of behaviro you want. Although you cannot predict the longterm behavior of the chaotic system, you can perturb it periodicaly to stabiize it or rapidlly shift its behavior. Scientists are looking at how to use this chaotic control theory to control unstable systems such as ultrahigh power lasers, manuerable jet aircraft, and heart tissue.
The key controlling a chaotic system is to understand how the chaotic system diverges (the shape of the strange attractor) and use that knowledge to deftly inject perturbations at just the right moment.
Re:Not chaotic? (Yes, you can control chaos) (Score:3, Funny)
Eww, why would someone want to fly in that?
Re:Not chaotic? (Yes, you can control chaos) (Score:4, Informative)
Re:Not chaotic? (Yes, you can control chaos) (Score:2)
Good point. Most of the chaos-control research that I have seen focuses on physical/dynamic systems.
discrete objects like cellular automata, which have no notion of divergence
Yes and no. With CA's the divergence can be expressed in terms of the state difference between initially similar configurations.
Re:Not chaotic? (Score:3, Interesting)
Another big problem: Article Hopelessly Vague (Score:3, Informative)
The gist of the new idea is a clever way to create a special type of gate whose dynamical threshold value can be modified to implement one of several possible logic gates. An interesting idea, but not computationally revolutionary. These gates would still implement the
Re:I just wanted to say ... (Score:2)
Re:I just wanted to say ... (Score:2)
Well, that's what I heard!
(Anybody old enough here to remember Ghostbusters?)
Hail Eris! (Score:1)
Sounds similar to... (Score:5, Informative)
Here [vwh.net] is an example.
Look [google.com]into what kind of mathematical operations can be realized with multiplying DACs.
Re:Sounds similar to... (Score:2, Insightful)
All signals are analog. Digital is just a way to manipulate analog for logic. The fact that they found another way to manipulate analog for logic is not suprising. What is suprising is that it has taken this long.
Missing the point entirely (Score:5, Insightful)
An analog computer does no such thing. If it wants to add two signals, it adds them. In analog. You can do integrals and derivations in analog as well, amongst other things.
A digital computer may have to use analog signals to operate on some level, but that does not make it an analog computer.
Appears to be a Star Wars reference ... (Score:2, Funny)
Re:Appears to be a Star Wars reference ... (Score:3, Funny)
may be ! (Score:2)
I'm confused (Score:5, Funny)
Wait...Rush Limbaugh has a Ph.D?
But is it easy to work with? (Score:4, Interesting)
Re:But is it easy to work with? (Score:3, Interesting)
If you haven't read his Eon, Eternity and Legacy trilogy I highly recommend them. Eternity is my favorite book.
Moving Mars was also very good and touched on some of the same QL stuff. Darwin's Radio was okay but I couldn't get into the sequel Darwin's Children. Blood Music was really good if a little creepy
Journalism at its best again (Score:3, Insightful)
i think this paragraph really sums things up. the editor is such a moron as to explicitly state the obvious grammatical correlation between mathematically chaotic logic circuits and the general "chaos" users experience with their computers. and that preceded by a description that sounds like some kind of vampirian (or is it vampirical?), frankensteinian, technological monster. (rob zombie brings you "attack of the chaotic leech borgs"!).
p.s. the chaotic leech borgs would be a good name for a band
Re:Journalism at its best again (Score:2)
Re:Journalism at its best again (Score:2)
Once again, people who have nothing better to do than to trick their friends with April Fool's jokes refuse to accept anything printed, published, posted, or spoken on the 1st day in April as truth.
Hate to pop your bubble,
Re:Journalism at its best again (Score:2)
In your eagerness to pander to standard slashdot biases, you have completely missed the point that the last sentence was intended to be humorous, which is amply demonstrated by the fact that the very first paragraph of the article said that chaos in the mathematical sense does not mean unpredictability. Sheesh.
OTOH, you might have been trolling, and I'm the sucker for replying... who knows :)
Re:Journalism at its best again (Score:2)
Yeah, it's pretty pedantic to point out that the joke at the end of the article is factually in error. I think a better criticism of the joke is that it's lame. It's the kind of stupid joke that loc
IEEE Definition (Score:5, Informative)
The way I see it (although I am not a mathematician), the major hurdle to realizing this is the fact that generating random numbers usually results in patterns.
Re:IEEE Definition (Score:5, Insightful)
Perhaps it's a semantical argument, but if you are producing patterns, you're not producing random numbers...
Re:IEEE Definition (Score:5, Informative)
Chaos is a middle-ground between purely ordered and purely random. There is structure in chaotic systems, it's only that on short orders of time it appears random to human neural signal processing - this is largely a limitation of the human capacity to perceive rather than a characteristic of the system observed.
Re:IEEE Definition (Score:2)
Chaos is a middle-ground between purely ordered and purely random. There is structure in chaotic systems, it's only that on short orders of time it appears random to human neural signal processing - this is largely a limitation of the human capacity to perceive rather than a characteristic of the system observed.
So is there such a thing as random at all? If we perceive something to be random, could not just as easily be ordered in a way we don't recognise?
Or if random does exist, woul
Re:IEEE Definition (Score:2)
Random is easy to define. According to my googling [google.com], 17 is The Most Random Number (despite a few spurious claims that it is 37, or 14).
Seriously though, your point is correct. "Random" simply means that no predictable order is discernable. The definition, therfore, is entirely dependent on your method of discernment. If you analyze closely enough the events lea
Re:IEEE Definition (Score:2)
But if that were the case (i.e. observation resulting in predictability), then I would assert that, regardless of the observation, the result is not random but merely pseudorandom (or in the case of online casinos and cryptography, "random enough"). Mere observation has nothing to do with whether or not it's random (quantum examples not
Re:IEEE Definition (Score:4, Informative)
Yes, most of the numbers in the space (0,1) are random. No, we cannot prove that any particular number is random. I *strongly* suggest reading The Dreams of Reason: The Computer and the Rise of the Sciences of Complexity by Heinz R. Pagels for an *excellent* treatment of these issues. An interesting point/counterpoint (with me being a bit of a troll at the outset, but I got props for him now) is here on slashdot is here [slashdot.org]
jaz
Re:IEEE Definition (Score:3)
Well, given that "random" is entirely a matter of perception, there really can be no platonic-ideal of randomness. Reality simply is what it is, and everything that happens, happens for one reason or another whether there's someone there to see it or not. It's essentially the same as the "tree falls in the woods" question*.
Are we destined for our fate? Or do we choose our paths?
Yes. (ha ha) The way I look at it, we choose our own pat
Re:IEEE Definition (Score:2)
Now that we've taken this topic as far off course as it can be, I going to run away and hide!
Re:Randomness in nature (Score:2)
But couldn't that only be considered "true randomness" if the decay happened for no reason? I postulate that nothing happens for no reason, and that the only thing that makes such radioisotope decay appear random is our inability to observe the cause of said decay. Then again, from our standpoint I suppose it could be considered "true randomness", but only because we have no means of steppin
Re:Randomness in nature (OT...) (Score:2)
http://www.cbc.ca/c
Re:IEEE Definition (Score:2)
An attribute of random is a normal distibution of values, so the reverse is also true, that is, if the result is not a bell curve, then the values aren't random.
That said, I'm not a stats guy. Thanks for making me think!
Re:IEEE Definition (Score:2)
But the probability of n sucesses from N Bernoulli trials approches a normal
my clone army (Score:2, Funny)
Secret Agent: Not so fast, Doctor Ditto!
Computing in a coffee cup (Score:5, Funny)
The last problem to be solved was to find a perfect source of randomness, which the galaxies best professors had been trying to solve for decades as whole departments had been built up on trying to solve this problem. Then one day, a brilliant student solves the problem by realizing a a cup of hot coffee provides this data. He is immediately awarded the highest Physics prize in the universe, and immediately lynched by his peers for being a smart-ass.
That's not how it goes. (Score:4, Informative)
Kinda sorta. (Score:5, Interesting)
This isn't quite the same thing as having randomly perturbed input thresholds, which is how neurons work. And, as anyone who's tried it knows, neurons are only about 95% efficient in determining the correct result. It takes a lot of logical processing on top of the neural bitwise decisionmaking to distill the 95% to the 99% or so correct answer rate that constitutes "intelligent thought".
And, they'd better look into real-world noise margin requirements for thresholding electrical switching decisions, or "chaotic" is all their output will ever be.
Re:Kinda sorta. (Score:2)
So what sort of magical new cell that you have discovered is involved in the logicification of neuronal input? I think you'll find that the magical cells are actually neurons themselves... :)
-l
Re:Kinda sorta. (Score:2)
Provided the logic impressed from the outside is correct in the first place.
Whaaa? (Score:2)
Uh, nothing you said in your post makes any sense. I wonder about a moderation system that gives you a +5 score.
Neurons do not "work" by having randomly perturbed input thresholds. Are you talking about some weird computational architecture of your own design, perhaps? Then you should cite it. If it involves "bitwise decisionmaking", then it's a very special architecture indeed.
Tell us more about this "intelligent thought" and how it corresponds to "correct answer rates". Those of us who have studi
Re:Whaaa? (Score:2)
What neurons even have constant input thresholds?
15 years? Maybe if you studied harder you'd get to graduate sometime.
P.S. If you know who Nick DeClaris and Stephen Grossberg are, then you know the guys who taught me. If you know who Hopfield, McCulloch and Pitts, and Amit, Gutfreund, and Sompolinksy are, then you know the papers I read in the first few days I was studying the artificial form of the science. Sadly, it hasn't changed much since th
Re:Whaaa? (Score:2)
We seem to be having a terminology gap. Unfortunately, this is not unusual for the Grossberg crowd. I'm not trying to flame, but the Cohen-Grossberg Theorem is not enough to rest one's laurels on. For some reason, that whole obsession with the stability/plasticity dilemma is really strange to me and (I believe) a majority of people in the field.
Neurons always have a clearly defined functional behavior. So yes, a neuron with a given set of weights *does* have clearly defined behavior. And no, if you've
I did something like this years ago (Score:2, Funny)
#include <stdlib.h>
double solve(void) {
return rand()
}
Sometimes, it will give you a root of x^2 - 7; other times, value of pi or phi. Once it even gave me the answer to the meaning of life, the universe and everything!
Re:I did something like this years ago (Score:2)
Windows user? (Score:2, Funny)
or is he just the 'friend' of this guy [slashdot.org]?
chaotic? i don't think so... (Score:5, Interesting)
personally, SMC is a bitch to debug, I can't imaging how one would begin to debug THIS beast...
Re:chaotic? i don't think so... (Score:2, Informative)
And, yes, there are reasons we're not all programming in LISP.
Re:chaotic? i don't think so... (Score:2)
Uh, that's not true at all.
blockquoth the article:
Model of computation (Score:2, Interesting)
Re:Model of computation (Score:2)
It wont upp the gigahurts, but it sounds nifty to reprogram my CPU to a new layout. Or even on the fly morphing CPU lay-outs
Using chaos isnt new, but leeches are. Somehow those leeches seem more interesting to me.
"/Dread"
Re:Model of computation (Score:2)
QC is not non-Turing. (Score:2)
Most people, when they say "Turing Machines", implicitly assume "deterministic Turing Machines". This is unfortunate, because Turing's Computational Theory is rich enough to describe many things beyond simple deterministic TMs.
Re:QC is not non-Turing. (Score:2)
Bzzt. The defining trait of a nondeterministic Turing Machine is that it has a transition relation rather than a transition function. This can be achieved in many different ways. One way to get a transition relation is to create a TM which has the capability to make extremely accurate guesses; another way to get a transition relation is to allow the TM to pursue multiple paths simultaneously (but not allow t
Chaotic voltage Levels (Score:2)
So when it came time to connect the logic together the problem was discovered so a 6 foot cabinet called the "Coupler Rack" was built and installed to interface these two dissimilar logic/voltages.
This rack was a good place to monitor the signals though since it interfaced the onboard
Re:Chaotic voltage Levels (Score:2)
You might also consider... (Score:4, Funny)
Better to have a computer with a good heart and a general distrust of authority than one which wants to enslave everyone and reduce the world to a desolate wasteland.
Pointy-Haired Computer? (Score:2)
The Windows version? (Score:2)
http://www.fulcrumgallery.com
quantum post (Score:4, Funny)
Re: This sounds like a joke (Score:3, Insightful)
Did you check the date on that Economist article.
Re: This sounds like a joke (Score:2)
from the article description (Score:2)
Instantaneously? Now that's a trick I'd like to see.
universal gates (Score:2)
If, on the other hand, we start using multiple voltage levels as part of digital circuits, it is still more efficient to use them as part of elements with dedicated functions.
Altogether, this doesn't seem like something that lets us do anything that we couldn't do before. The reason it isn't being done is probably that it's not useful (even FPGAs generally choose to fix t
Read a book about Leeches?! (Score:2, Funny)
I remember for my System's Analyst and Design class my teacher mentioning how they were already wiring organic matter to computer chips. One unfortunate student who made the great mistake to vocalized his complete shock over this, from which this cynical and suggestive instructor bluntly responded to him, "Read a book!" Mind you this particular student had the appearance of a
How is this different from just (Score:2)
Read the paper (Score:4, Informative)
This sounds like nothing more than an FPGA (Score:3, Interesting)
For those who don't know, an FPGA is a flexible computer chip. Imagine a motherboard full 100,000s or millions of solid state "glue logic" gates that could be re-aranged by little elves repeatedly, and that's an FGPA, but larger, and less expensive. You could build an 8088, then a DSP, then a fast FFT, a converter, then a crypto processor, whatever. Creative uses them on some soundblasters so the hardware (yes, the hardware) can be upgraded ith more features in the future. On mine they added a few digital effects and the ability to handle another few hundred MIDI voices.
Re:great (Score:1)
Re:great (Score:2)
Unless i is 0, then it just randomly crashes (divide by zero).
Re:In The Economist? (Score:2)
Re:1+1 = null (Score:3, Interesting)
Imagine you could watch two one-hour long TV shows simultaneously superimposed onto each other on the same TV (and understand both shows seperately.) Now imagine you have have two TV with the same capability. Now you can watch four shows in one hour. This is the essence of this computing theory: you can do more calculations in less time but not in the normal computing sense. I prefer to think of standard binary computing as a direct derivative of quantum computing, much like velocity