Hacker Newsnew | past | comments | ask | show | jobs | submitlogin

Nifty, makes one wonder if logarithmic or sigmoid functions for ML could be done using this method. Especially as we approach the node size limit, perhaps dealing with fuzzy analog will become more valuable.


There are a few startups making analog ML compute. Mythic & Aspinity for example

https://www.eetimes.com/aspinity-puts-neural-networks-back-t...


Analog pid controllers: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ps9iD738rUg Soviet IR tracking missile heads too. Stumbled upon one on ebay once, was surprised the control system was analog. Not sure which one it was and I'm very surprised to find a Raytheon AIM 9 Sidewinder missile kit there: https://www.ebay.com/itm/273992271867


Veritasium has a bit of an video on Mythic - Future Computers Will Be Radically Different (Analog Computing) - https://youtu.be/GVsUOuSjvcg


From "Faraday and Babbage: Semiconductors and Computing in 1833" https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32888210 and then "Qubit: Quantum register: Qudits and qutrits" https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31983110:

>>> The following is an incomplete list of physical implementations of qubits, and the choices of basis are by convention only: [...] Qubit#Physical_implementations: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Qubit#Physical_implementations

> - note the "electrons" row of the table

According to this Table on wikipedia, it's possible to use electron charge (instead of 'spin') to do Quantum Logic with Qubits.

How is that doing quantum logical computations with electron charge different from from what e.g. Cirq or Tequila do (optionally with simulated noise to simulate the Quantum Computer Engineering hardware)?

FWIU, analog and digital component qualities are not within sufficient tolerance to do precise analog computation? (Though that's probably debatable for certain applications at least, but not for general purpose computing architectures?) That is, while you can build adders out of voltage potentials quantified more specifically than 0 or 1, you might shouldn't without sufficient component spec tolerances because noise and thus error.

IMHO, Turing Tumble and Spintronics are neat analog computer games.

(Are Qubits, by Church-Turing-Deutsch, sufficient to; 1) simuluate arbitrary quantum physical systems; or 2) run quantum logical simulations as circuits with low error due to high coherence? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Church%E2%80%93Turing%E2%80%93... )

>> See also: "Quantum logic gate" https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quantum_logic_gate

Analog computers > Electronic analog computers aren't Electronic digital computers: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Analog_computer#Electronic_ana...




Guidelines | FAQ | Lists | API | Security | Legal | Apply to YC | Contact

Search: