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Ask HN: What excites you most about Neuromorphic Hardware?
I just finished https://arxiv.org/abs/1705.06963 and was pleasantly surprised at state of neurotrophic computing. Specifically, the use of organic materials to build robust, low power networks that get past the von Neumann bottleneck and allow us to incorporate new levels of sensing into our environment and lives seems extraordinary. TPUs and chips are obviously interesting for orgs like google, but what about synthetic clusters of neurons integrated into our environment? How significant could that be?
- o_wilson 8y agoWow bit of ‘light reading’ needed before answering this question. :-p
- gervase 8y agoNote that the linked article is only about 22 pages, followed by 2682 (!) references.
- Vanit 8y agoI for one welcome our new Typhon overlords.
- orliesaurus 8y agocan someone explain it to the uninitiated?
- j1vms 8y agoIn case anyone is interested, Carver Mead's 1990 seminal paper on the subject [0]. It's a fairly accessible read, and covers the power/computational efficiency trade-offs on the spectrum from natural, biological systems to manufactured analog vs. digital electronic systems. [0] https://web.stanford.edu/group/brainsinsilicon/documents/MeadNeuroMorphElectro.pdf https://web.stanford.edu/group/brainsinsilicon/documents/Mea... [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carver_Mead https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carver_Mead
- alok-g 8y agoPS: I did not read the paper again. Most of such analysis reporting brain to be more power efficient than computers talk about energy it would require to emulate brain operations in silicon. That does not sound like a fair comparison. How about the energy a brain would need to emulate a computer chip, say multiplying a billion floating point numbers? For a fair comparison, we must do a comparison for the same neutral task, one that both machines and brains can do. It's would need discussions to define what would this be since capabilites of each still show wide differences. Likewise, some texts assume each synapse to carry a memory of say a byte, and then claim our brain has a memory of about 10^15 bytes. A human brain cannot actually recall all that information, the latter is estimated to be at about 10-30 MB only (per an old book I read).
- marmaduke 8y ago> brain cannot actually recall all that information it’s not random byte addressable memory. Neither are the big DL models. But that doesn’t mean it’s not making use of the 10^15 bytes when doing things it’s good at.
- p1esk 8y agoYou should probably read the paper again. The comparison Mead proposed is for the energy spent on a simplest fundamental computing event. In the case of a brain, it's a single neural pulse going through a synapse. In the case of a digital computer, it's a switching of a single transistor. In both cases, we can calculate how many events happen per second, and we know the power consumption. A brain simply does more operations per second than the fastest computer chip, while spending less energy. You might disagree on what constitutes a fundamental computing event, and we can discuss that, but the idea seems valid to me.
- alok-g 8y agoAn apples-to-apples comparison should not care for what the fundamental unit is, unless it can be argued to be the equal in terms of what it does to the problem being solved. The common factor needs to be the same problem given to both to see how much power is consumed. Or alternatively, we could compare what they could do with a given amount of power with a common output performance metric.
- geuis 8y agoAt a high level, I think the top level advantages potentially are in power saving and flexibility when working on machine learning problems. The brain is very power efficient compared to modern computers. Incorporating more “organic” structured can lead to much greater power efficiency. As more is learned about efficient neural network models, implementing them in hardware will lead to much faster and cheaper learning models.
- yters 8y agoI've seen use of rat brains to control devices. Is that considered neuromorphic? Has there been an attempt to use human brain matter in such devices?
- jonmrodriguez 8y agoDon't you think this would constitute slavery? Shouldn't this be extremely illegal?
- deleted 8y ago[deleted]
- OJFord 8y agoHave you ever heard of dairy farms, or horses? If not, I'd advise against searching.
- shkkmo 8y agoCows and horses are not people. The use of human brains or human brain matter brings up slavery in a way that rat brains don't because owning animals is not considered morally equivalent to owning people.
- OJFord 8y agoAh, sorry, I skipped over the 'human brain in...' part of the post, and thought GP was responding to 'rat brains'. Please ignore.
- yters 8y agoYes, I think it would represent a new kind of slavery, and should be extremely illegal.
- OJFord 8y agoProfessor Kevin Warwick is at least one person to work on 'rat brain robots'. I recall he also implanted something in himself to allow controlling other things with normal arm movements, which is sort of using 'human brain matter in such devices', though in situ.
- rs23296008n1 8y agoThe name. Branding for this is great. The technical side also has huge potential. (No this isn't sarcasm or some kind of hipster in-joke)
- modeless 8y agoNeuromorphic hardware is barking up the wrong tree if you ask me. What excites me is not hardware that works like brains work, but software that does what brains can do. If you want to fly, don't try to build a bird. Build an airplane.
- vinay427 8y agoI would agree if the goal is to fly. For some researchers, however, the goal is actually to apply neuromorphic hardware to humans, i.e. to build a bird rather than just to fly.
- hackandtrip 8y agoIn a sense, aren't we trying to take inspiration from a model evolved in many million years? We are trying to build an airplane taking inspiration from a bird. Also, emulating the way brain work can be seen as one of the many paths towards AGI, can't it? Even if, AGI speaking, to my understanding the computation speed is not the problem.
- modeless 8y agoNeural networks are already loosely inspired by the brain. Neuromorphic hardware is taking things too far. Just as airplanes were a better path to flight than ornithopters, iterating on AI techniques that work is a better path to AGI than brain imitation.
- gisely 8y agoEnergy efficiency! Our brains vastly outperform existing hardware while using less energy and producing less heat. Once we understand more about what makes them capable of that we will be able to push hardware well beyond its current thermal-related problems.
- alok-g 8y agoCan you share some references. See my comment on this page here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18425019 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18425019 Thanks.
- FlowNote 8y agoBinding them to Neanderthal organiods. Yes, we have plans to do exactly this. If you'd like to be part of the wildness of that idea and have neuromorphic and/or spiking neural network and/or genetics experience, send an e-mail to patrick.ryan@emblem21.com
- jonmrodriguez 8y agoPatrick, don't you think you should reflect on what you are doing before taking sentient neurons and forcing them to live their entire lives confined inside a machine, with no possibility of escape? How would you enjoy being born into such captivity? What would you do if you were experiencing an endless state of pain but lacked the language ability to communicate your pain to your owner? I have written to the Vatican already suggesting that they push to make neural slavery illegal, as it violates the principle of the dignity of sentient life. I hope you will please reflect on what you are doing and stop doing it voluntarily instead of waiting for the laws to change and make what you are doing illegal. Whether legal or not, any form of slavery is immoral.
- eindiran 8y agoIs this satire or do you actually believe that this constitutes sentience being digitally enslaved?
- jonmrodriguez 8y agoThis is not satire. If it helps explain my position, I also agree with the scientific consensus that animals, not just humans, are sentient, and that sentience comes in varying degrees rather than just a binary yes or no. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Animal_consciousness#Cambridge_Declaration_on_Consciousness https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Animal_consciousness#Cambridge... For what it's worth, I am vegan and have invested 10 years worth of my salary into synthetic meat companies to help save animal lives.
- solipsism 8y agoCurious to know how the Vatican comes into this. Not much of science pays any attention to that regressive medieval institution.
- stealthcat 8y agoRemember when William Ditto actually made wetware computing using live neuron cells (yep living cells), but he saw the potential of such computer and stopped research. Instead he focused in chaos computing, and founded Chaologix, where he made analog circuit that can transform to different logic gates very fast. But recently they are acquired by ARM. The only company I know that is doing wetware computing today is koniku.io though they are super secretive about their progress. And they only made sensors for now. Now we are trying to emulate plasticity of growing brain with rigid, solid state electronics. I'm not that positive, so stay to deep learning and backprop for now...
- hsikka 8y agoWhoah this is super interesting, do you have any papers or research you can point me to? I'd love to learn more about this because i'm a neuroscience and AI student.
- allanmacgregor 8y agoDo you have any more details on koniku.io or similar processes? I find the subject interesting, while other people on the thread might be right and is actually barking at the wrong tree that doesn't make it less interesting.
- marmaduke 8y agoIf we learn how to program them reliably it’s huge.
- fulafel 8y agoInteresting that in Fig. 10, half of the HW implementations are analog or partially analog.
- vinceguidry 8y agoReally the only thing that interests me is being able to control a computer with thought, if I can look at a screen and 'click' in my head, to me that's basically Star Trek utopia. Having a thought-controlled keyboard would be awesome too, but not nearly as cool as a mouse. The rest of it can go in the bin, but I'm sure some of it might be neat.