6 ms·
Nanowire synapses 30,000x faster than nature’s
- thrown_22 4y agoBullets also fly 30,000 times faster than bumble bees. We're not about to use them for pollination though.
- visarga 4y agoComputers calculate billions of times faster than the brain, what's your point?
- thrown_22 4y agoThat computers aren't brains.
- IIAOPSW 4y agoA brain can certainly memorize and follow a fixed set of rules to update the tape on a Turing machine. Therefore the brain is at least a Universal Computer. Furthermore there is nothing in the domain of sensory-motor tasks that is in principle beyond computer controlled robotics. So then praytell, what can a brain do that a computer can't? Careful. The current answers to that question live on a small island that's been eroding at an alarming pace. Some project that the island will be totally washed away in our lifetime. You sure you want to build there?
- thrown_22 4y ago>Careful. The current answers to that question live on a small island that's been eroding at an alarming pace. Some project that the island will be totally washed away in our lifetime. You sure you want to build there? Yeah.
- IIAOPSW 4y agoElaborate why?
- samus 4y agoThe answer to that question is capabilities usually attributed to Strong AI. Depending on who you ask, we are currently either 10 years or forever away from that, which pretty much means the same.
- ehvatum 4y agoObviously, that a nanowire-based bumblebee could be fired from a gun and rapidly pollinate.
- POiNTx 4y agoI know these don't map 1-to-1 on real natural synapses, but let's say you can magically replace all your natural synapses in a brain with this. What would be the experienced effect? Would you be able to think faster, or would perceived time slow down? Or something else?
- miovoid 4y agoImagine a game world, where all your opponents 30000 times slower, 30000 times less energy efficient. Time and energy central resources in this game, which cannot be faked anyhow. Even if nuclear fusion or antimatter energy sources are everywhere.
- manholio 4y agoSounds like a very boring game. The two races are basically distinct, just like the human race is distinct from geology. For all we know, Earth's geology might be sentient already.
- netsharc 4y agoI wonder if a human's "refresh rate" has been evolutionary optimized for its environment. Maybe there's no need to evaluate things 30000x faster if our bodies can't react that fast. I guess it would make for faster reaction times, e.g. when driving: driver in front of you hits the brakes, the vision signal enters your brain with the same delay (are optic nerves synapses too?), but I guess the difference is your brain would be able to process the meaning of the change (the red lights coming on, the car getting larger in your vision) a lot faster. The brain then sends a signal for the foot to react, but the amount of time it will take for the foot to move will be the same as normal since the signal takes the same time to reach the foot. I imagine at 30000x, you would notice that it's taking very very long for the foot to move. To notice it would mean to have feedback from the skin inside your socks/pants that the foot/leg is moving against your sock/pants, and the brain will probably think that feedback is taking forever after it sent the signal.
- JohnJamesRambo 4y ago
- gardenfelder 4y agoThe piece is chock full of interesting findings, using terms biologists routinely use. But, do those terms they use, e.g. neuron, synapse mean the same thing they do for biologists? For instances, we know that synapses can be one of excitatory or inhibitory, and we know that neurons are bathed in a wash of hormones. Neurons make hormones which serve other functions throughout the brain. For instance "Neuron-Derived Estrogen Regulates Synaptic Plasticity and Memory" [1]. How does the linked work stack up against that? [1] https://www.jneurosci.org/content/39/15/2792 https://www.jneurosci.org/content/39/15/2792
- superkuh 4y agoAll that, more, and it seems like every computational biology analogy just completely forgets about the most common cell type in the brain: astrocytes. And then there are things like axo-axonal transmission that totally blow up the simple models, https://www.cell.com/neuron/fulltext/S0896-6273(22)00656-0 https://www.cell.com/neuron/fulltext/S0896-6273(22)00656-0
- ad404b8a372f2b9 4y agoCan you elaborate on how the axo-axonal transmissions blow up our simple models? I couldn't understand anything from that summary. Would it be the equivalent of edges communicating between each other in artifical neural networks?
- bismuthcrystal 4y agoBiologists just won't allows us to have any fun. It is always this kind of rhetoric: "what, are you modeling the brain without considering the influence of <insert obscure type of cell> on the hormone regulated blood flow around ion pump circuits during chinese new year neuron firing patterns? you are obviously bounded to fail..." This whole AI field keeps on failing because people like to overthink things. Did Michelangelo need to know molecular chemistry to make sculptures? Why do people pretend there is no artistic component to building AI? Rant finished.
- 4y ago
- raziel2701 4y agoThese work only at a few Kelvin because they need superconducting nanowires. Will this type of stuff ever leave the lab?
- TheRealPomax 4y agoNot exactly impressive, nature is famous for calling it quits once something works well enough. Anyone who wants to can create a non-biological neuron/axion connection that runs orders of magnitude faster. The real question is "but does it actually do something" because that's where nature shines pretty well.
- miovoid 4y agoTuring and Church said yes.
- TheRealPomax 4y agoSaid yes to... what? That artificial neurons can do something useful? Because those weren't a thing when they were scienceing it up.
- yourapostasy 4y ago> ...nature is famous for calling it quits once something works well enough... Great, so we're just bags of meat sashaying around with loads of technical debt baggage via the slapdash coding delivered by nature in a multi-billion year project. The ongoing result of always picking good and cheap over fast.
- TheRealPomax 4y agoyou bet, nature looked at min-max strategies and went "k but what if min-med instead?" then did that for a few billion years.
- TeacherTortoise 4y ago> nature is famous for calling it quits Yes, evolution builds upon what went before rather than starting fresh, but nature never calls it quits. It's a process, not a thinking entity. In any stable population there will be variances that have neither a benefit or cost until environmental pressures force it to "select" the most appropriate. You have to look at a longer timescale to see the adaptations take hold. You could say species dying out is calling it quits in a way, but evolution encompasses everything not just the extinct - but I don't think that's what you meant.
- yarg 4y agoWhat're the thermal dissipation requirements? How densly is it possible to structure them and still provide adequate cooling?
- incrudible 4y agoThe cooling problem is not thermal dissipation, but rather getting to superconductivity, which generally requires temperatures near absolute zero.
- dschuetz 4y agoI'm not sure whatever for they need such nanowire synapses, because in real/wet neural networks the timings of neural firing, delay and latency is as essential as the synapse itself. How fast a wet synapse works is modulated, some are isolated from modulation. I don't think a new synthetic synapse being 30.000x faster will do anything good if the whole system is not up to par with a wet neural system.