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http://phys.org/news/2015-09-disordered-evolving-breakthrough-nanoparticle-boolean.html
"Evolution of a designless nanoparticle network into reconfigurable
Boolean logic." Nature Nanotechnology (2015)
Abstract
/*Natural computers* exploit the emergent properties and massive
parallelism of interconnected networks of locally active components.
Evolution has resulted in systems that compute quickly and that use
energy efficiently, utilizing whatever physical properties are
exploitable. Man-made computers, on the other hand, are based on
circuits of functional units that follow given design rules. Hence,
potentially exploitable physical processes, such as capacitive
crosstalk, to solve a problem are left out. Until now, designless
nanoscale networks of inanimate matter that exhibit robust computational
functionality had not been realized. Here we artificially evolve the
electrical properties of a disordered nanomaterials system (by
optimizing the values of control voltages using a genetic algorithm) to
perform computational tasks reconfigurably. We exploit the rich
behaviour that emerges from interconnected metal nanoparticles, which
act as strongly nonlinear single-electron transistors, and find that
this nanoscale architecture can be configured in situ into any Boolean
logic gate. This universal, reconfigurable gate would require about ten
transistors in a conventional circuit. Our system meets the criteria for
the physical realization of (cellular) neural networks: universality
(arbitrary Boolean functions), compactness, robustness and evolvability,
which implies scalability to perform more advanced tasks. Our
evolutionary approach works around device-to-device variations and the
accompanying uncertainties in performance. Moreover, it bears a great
potential for more energy-efficient computation, and for solving
problems that are very hard to tackle in conventional architectures.
/
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