My love of fast and exotic computers is hardly a secret, so it should come as no surprise that I am very excited about the invention of a practical memristor. If you don’t know what a memristor is, it is a resistor than can have its resistance altered and remember this new state once the power is turned off.
The reason I am so excited is that with memristors data no longer needs to be stored in a binary fashion. This means that more complex information can be stored as a single entity; this is prefect for effectively storing sequence data or other types of alphanumeric data.
Also memristors can allow the creation of robust non-purpose built hybrid computers, and artificial neural networks. These computers might not be “fast” in the traditional sense, but they could do things that digital computers cannot do effectively, like systems control or advanced adaptive logic.
From reading about memristors further I guess I should have been excited back in 2000 when IBM published an article showing how to build a memristor… Either way it’s still exciting stuff.
No comments:
Post a Comment