There's another similar such element - which has a somewhat confusingly similar name: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Memistor https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Memi

There's another similar such element - which has a somewhat confusingly similar name: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Memistor https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Memistor It was developed by Bernard Widrow in 1960, whereas the memristor was envisioned and named in 1971 - but not found to actually exist until 2008. The memistor was most "famously" used to develop a couple of artificial intelligence (neural network) systems, ADALINE and MADALINE: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ADALINE https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ADALINE Note that if you try to google "memistor", you'll maddeningly get suggestions and results for "memristors" instead - even when you tell google to show you only results for memistors only; this makes finding information about them online difficult. It's best to add to your search "adaline", "madaline", and/or "widrow". The main difference between the two devices are that the memistor is a three-terminal device, versus the memristor being a two-terminal device. You can think of the memistor as being a "memory transistor" vs the memristor as a "memory resistor". This is gross simplification, of course. One other interesting thing about ADALINE is how simple the memistors are to construct; you can effectively re-create ADALINE at home, as Widrow's paper shows: http://www-isl.stanford.edu/~widrow/papers/t1960anadaptive.pdf http://www-isl.stanford.edu/~widrow/papers/t1960anadaptive.p... On the topic of memristors - they can be DIY'd as well: http://sparkbangbuzz.com/memristor/memristor.htm http://sparkbangbuzz.com/memristor/memristor.htm Finally - if you're interested in this kind of thing (that is, implementing hardware analogs of brain functionality), google "neuromorphic computing"...