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But analog computers do not permit error correction! Crosstalk of 10% does not affect digital data busses, but ruins analog. ECC memory is trivial with digital
by krastanov 10y ago
But analog computers do not permit error correction! Crosstalk of 10% does not affect digital data busses, but ruins analog. ECC memory is trivial with digital but not possible even in theory with analog. This (and programmability) is why we moved from super fast analog to slow digital half a century ago.
Given all these constraints I am actually quite excited to hear more of the dissenting view. Can you describe some of the research you mentioned in the last sentence? I have not heard of it and if true it would be at least interesting engineering, even if right now I doubt it would actually work.
- cjhanks 10y agoA significant portion of any real-world AI system is dedicated to extracting relevant features from raw sensor information. Doing that digitally has proven to have a very high cost rated in both watts and operating temperature. Most machine learning algorithms are by design resilient to random noise. They can even be learned to be resilient to systematic noise (due to say.. variable hardware performance in mass production). In those cases; a low power analog device with lower reliability guarantees is 'ok'. I suspect the "decision engines" (the computation enforcing complex logic based on sensor readings) will probably continue to be on CPU's for some time.
- Retric 10y agoThe problem is you now dramatically increased the cost of training. Which might be ok for speech recognition, but not for self driving cars etc.
- cjhanks 10y agoAny feature extractor worth using will be robust against some amount of Gaussian noise. The neural nets will probably never even see the bad readings. It would surprise me if even unfiltered analog noise in the sensors significantly changed recall. I suppose I don't know off-hand know the magnitude of noise in typical analog systems.
- petra 10y agoISOcline.com has one approach, building an analog neuron , and digitizing the inputs and outputs to minimize noise . As a proof of concept they did a GPS chip , with 66 times higher energy efficiency. There are others working on analog neural compute , some released good research results .