"Building an analog computer in which you don't use 1s and 0s and instead use essentially all shades of gray in between is one of the things we're already worki

"Building an analog computer in which you don't use 1s and 0s and instead use essentially all shades of gray in between is one of the things we're already working on," says Williams. These computers could do the types of things that digital computers aren't very good at –- like making decisions, determining that one thing is larger than another, or even learning." How else do they think analog computers worked in the first place?: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Analog_computers http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Analog_computers You can implement that stuff with caps, op amps and resistors. I don't know, maybe the substances they use have better differential nonlinearity characteristics across temperature. All you need is a transistor and the proper bias voltage to create a simple analog computer.