InquiryLabs » Science

Stanley Williams and the Memristor

Duane Johnson — Sat, 24 Apr 2010 01:12:29 +0000

Ever since the discovery of the memristor was announced at HP labs last year, I’ve been fascinated by its story and its promises. Now, its inventor Stanley Williams has given a presentation (available on YouTube) that goes in to some of the mathematical details and further predictions that he has for the device.

It’s a 45 minute presentation, but if you’re interested in the future of computing, I think you’ll enjoy it. I was impressed with the foresight of Leon Chua who in the late 1960s and early 70s discovered via mathematical exercise the “missing circuit element” that should relate flux to charge. If I were him, I think I’d have lost a little confidence in my work if my predictions hadn’t panned out after 40 years.

In addition to the neat math behind it (the memristor is the only fundamental circuit component that is time-variant, and therefore cannot be described in a single equality relationship), Williams makes some stunning claims about the potential of the memristor. For example, in strange agreement with Ray Kurzweil’s predictions, Williams shows a 3D cube of memristors on his slides. He predicts that we will soon have memory storage devices that last for “geologic time” (i.e. thousands or millions of years) but that can react at nanosecond switching speeds. What’s more, because the memory is passive (no energy required to sustain) the memristor is perfectly suited to low-power and low-heat systems: in other words, it just makes sense to stack them on top of each other. Williams calculates a theoretical limit of 1 petabit of storage per cubic centimeter (I think he said square centimeter in the presentation, but I assume he misspoke, since his slide shows a 3D cube?)

Another exciting part of the presentation comes near the end where Williams shows how the memristor may play a role in the next 10 years of computing achievements. He highlights the work of the HP photonics lab and claims that data transfer will soon be achieved through light (photons) for distances greater than a micrometer. With the remarkable ability of memristors to be both memory and logic gates (they naturally form the “implication” logic function which Bertrand Russell showed could represent logical operations in the most compact form), Williams envisions a computing device with hundreds or thousands of cores in a 3D matrix, with photonic message passing between devices. He estimates that in 10 years, the combination of these two technologies will increase our computation-per-dollar by 100 times.

And last but not least was the incredible insight, this time once again from Leon Chua, that the memristor behaves much like a human neuron. The HP lab that invented the memristor is already working on a prototype chip that will attempt to emulate the neurons in a brain, much like the Bluegene-L system has achieved. As Williams pointed out in his presentation, the key here is emulation, not simulation. Up until now, we have only been able to simulate the brain with our computing technology. What will it be like to properly emulate it?

Proposed restructuring of the evolutionary “tree”

Duane Johnson — Fri, 20 Feb 2009 04:18:59 +0000

I’ve been thinking and reading about horizontal or “lateral gene transfer” in prokaryotes and I have a hypothesis. I’ve been reading this article (”The tree of one percent”) which inspired in part this New Scientist article on the topic. Basically, there is a great deal of evidence that in bacteria at least, there is a lot of genetic information being passed between species–not necessarily from parent to daughter cell, but actually from cell to living cell.

Suppose that life “created itself” in the evolutionary sense (this does not necessarily exclude a god or anything like that, I’m just proposing we consider a universe where it is possible for non-living things to become living things without an actual “engineer” that connects molecules or plants the first “seed cell” or whatever).

If life “created” itself, then it seems that just like it takes a long time (i.e. hundreds of thousands of years) for one species to bifurcate into one or more other species, we would expect that there is a long transition period between protolife (i.e. pre-cellular life) and cellular life. What would protolife be like? It would consist of complex molecules, manufacturing processes, and information transmission mechanisms, all within the earth’s “protobiosphere”, like one giant cell. It would be very slow, and very inefficient. Communication would be terrible. Mechanisms would be faulty, etc. In short, it would be an ineffective system, but if it worked, then it worked, and that was good enough.

Now suppose that the first prokaryote (a cell without a nucleus) had formed, perhaps by the enlarging of a small container unit. This larger container unit would be an anomaly in the One Great Cell, because it would kind of be like a little world all on its own. But it would certainly not be immune to all of the other communication signals going on around it from which it was recently “born”. Rather, it would be dependent on them and the physical materials produced there for its very perpetuation. In other words, Lateral Gene Transfer (communication within the One Great Cell) would actually have been the *first* gene transfer mechanism, not a strange oddity in present-day genetics where we assume almost all gene transfer is tree-like.

If this hypothesis is correct, then we would expect to see more LGT going on in life forms that are closer to the original One Great Cell, and less LGT going on in “higher order” organisms such as multicellular eukaryotic beings. Still, LGT might exist even at the highest end (e.g. viral DNA transfer) but it would be much lower than the more ancient bacteria for instance. The “tree of life” becomes real at the most advanced end of life, but it may have its roots in a proto “web of life” that didn’t distinguish species (there wouldn’t have been “individuals” at that time, so the existence of a “species” doesn’t make sense).

Perhaps higher-order organisms have created “defense mechanisms” against LGT because of the potential that LGT has to drag down their efficiency. ”Transmissible disease” then could be seen as leftover attempts at lateral gene transfer from each order of life. Bacteria have viruses that they have to fend off because viruses played some important transmission role long ago. Animals have both bacteria and viruses to fend off. In each case, the One Great Cell is still trying to communicate between its constituent parts, but the parts have become intelligent enough on their own to know that they must defend against a permissive information transfer protocol.

Thus, our most recent ancestors fit what Darwin correctly identified as a “tree” and microbiologists are also right in identifying something “untree-like” in the most ancient of Earth’s past.

What do you think?

Why Atheists Shouldn’t Make Fun of Religious Believers

Duane Johnson — Tue, 30 Sep 2008 17:02:47 +0000

Bill Maher will be releasing his new documentary, Religulous, this Friday. I was interested at first, but the more I saw, the less I wanted to see. I think Bill, and other atheists like him such as Richard Dawkins who “go on the offense” are making a mistake for two reasons:

In centuries past, those who have sought freedom from religion have been persecuted for their lack of belief in God. Bruno is perhaps the ultimate example. If atheism has within its system a superior ethic for the treatment of other human beings, shouldn’t its proponents lead out? The mockery and persecution of others for their beliefs is, in my view, the antithesis of ethical atheism. Rational argument, tolerance, education, and uplifting humanism on the other hand, is what I see as the height of doubt.
Irrational belief is the “default setting” for human beings, and as long as our species has death and birth, irrational belief in something will always outpace the philosophy of doubt. Since doubt requires considerable time and education, atheists—by mathematical constraint—will always be in the minority. Mocking the religious, therefore, may be a grave tactical error in the fight for populous doubt: a short-term win may become the impetus for a long-term washout. Supposing religious belief is ignorance, then the opposition need only reproduce faster to win; meanwhile, atheists need to both reproduce and educate their offspring.

If you are an atheist, I hope you will hear this plea: Don’t take the low road to “bringing people around” to your view. It will backfire.

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Making Water from Air

Duane Johnson — Sat, 30 Aug 2008 02:05:37 +0000

Along with solar energy, one technology that has fascinated me recently is the various “air to water” condensers or Atmospheric Water Generators as they’ve been called. The technology doesn’t quite seem fully developed yet, but I imagine that if these start-ups have their way, nearly free water will be available at any location on earth, with just (somewhat humid) air and solar energy as ingredients.

The coolest technology award goes to the “dew catching pyramid”, WatAir, which is basically a big water collector that looks like beautiful architecture and has no electric or moving parts. Unfortunately, it seems the only photos are just mock-ups at this point, so I’m not even sure if it’s a real-life object yet.

But for the more practically minded (which may or may not include myself), I’ve also checked out several “water station” type generators that would be a replacement for the traditional “office water dispenser” that seems to be in every suave office space. The brands I’ve compared include:

* EcoloBlue (currently my favorite)

* AquaMaker

* AirWater

* WaterMaster

* TerraLab

* Wataire International

* AirToH2O

* Aqua Sciences

See this spreadsheet for a comparison of available data. I wish there were more price points to compare from, but that’s all I have to work with right now.

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The greatest archeological treasure of our generation

Duane Johnson — Mon, 25 Aug 2008 03:03:38 +0000

This is one of the coolest things I’ve heard about, ever. It isn’t a technological fad that will be superseded in a year or two… it will last thousands of years. It’s called The Rosetta Project, and according to Kevin Kelly, it was just completed this week:

The Rosetta Disk is intended to be a durable archive of human languages, as well as an aesthetic object that suggests a journey of the imagination across culture and history. We have attempted to create a unique physical artifact which evokes the great diversity of human experience as well as the incredible variety of symbolic systems we have constructed to understand and communicate that experience.

The Disk surface shown here, meant to be a guide to the contents, is etched with a central image of the earth and a message written in eight major world languages: “Languages of the World: This is an archive of over 1,000 human languages assembled in the year 02002 C.E. Magnify 1,000 times to find over 15,000 pages of language documentation.” The text begins at eye-readable scale and spirals down to nano-scale. This tapered ring of languages is intended to maximize the number of people that will be able to read something immediately upon picking up the Disk, as well as implying the directions for using it—‘get a magnifier and there is more.’

On the reverse side of the disk from the globe graphic are 15,000 microetched pages of language documentation. Since each page is a physical rather than digital image, there is no platform or format dependency. Reading the Disk requires only optical magnification. Each page is .019 inches, or half a millimeter, across. This is about equal in width to 5 human hairs, and can be read with a 500X microscope (individual pages are clearly visible with 100X magnification).

The 15,000 pages in the collection contain documentation on over 2500 languages gathered from archives around the world. For each language we have several categories of data—descriptions of the speech community, maps of their location(s), and information on writing systems and literacy. We also collect grammatical information including descriptions of the sounds of the language, how words and larger linguistic structures like sentences are formed, a basic vocabulary list (known as a “Swadesh List”), and whenever possible, texts. Many of our texts are transcribed oral narratives. Others are translations such as the beginning chapters of the Book of Genesis or the UN Declaration of Human Rights.

I’ve long held a belief in the importance of information and its archival–not only as a computer guy who knows what it’s like to lose a week’s worth of work, but also as a humanist who loves the idea of preserving our knowledge for future generations. I just wish I could afford one at $25k

Take a look:

See and download the full gallery on posterous

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CherryPal is Available

Duane Johnson — Thu, 14 Aug 2008 21:46:07 +0000

I’ve been pretty excited by cheap, low-energy computers since bringing my green wireless network online. Now, the 2-watt CherryPal is available and I’m drooling again. I wonder if it could double as a file server? If so, it would be the perfect solution for our always-on network. For $249, I’m considering…

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