Professor Leon Chua
There is a new word lurking in the arcane language of electronics that may describe a breakthrough in the science of artificial intelligence. It is “memristor”.The more familiar elements of electronic circuits are resistors, capacitors and inductors. An electronics engineer at the University of California, Berkeley, Leon Chua, was convinced there was a fourth missing element that seemed to be present in nature. It turned out to be the elusive memristor.
According to New Scientist Magazine “within the past couple of years, memristors have morphed from obscure jargon into one of the hottest properties in physics. They’ve not only been made, but their unique capabilities might revolutionize consumer electronics.”
Scientists believe memristors might solve the puzzle of how nature makes what is described as “the most delicate and powerful of computers-the human brain.”
A team at Hewlett Packard is working on ways to link a memristor-based chip to a complex model of brain synapses. The Defense Advanced Research Project Agency, where the Internet was born, announced an effort called the “Systems of Neuromorphic Adaptive Plastic Scalable Electronics Program” SyNapse for short.
Chua was quoted as saying attempts to create electronics that can mimic the awesome power of a brain may have achieved little success simply because they lack crucial electronic components, namely memristors.