THIS NETWORK OF HIGHLY INTERTWINED NANOWIRES CAN LOOK CHAOTIC AND RANDOM, ITS STRUCTURE

This network of highly intertwined nanowires can look chaotic and random, but its structure and behavior resemble the behavior of brain neurons. Scientists from NanoSystems develop it as a device-brain for learning and computing Moreover, preliminary experiments show that this neuromorphic (that is, brain-like) silver wire mesh has a large functional potential. It can already perform simple training and logical operations. It can clean the received signal from unwanted noise, and it is an important ability to recognize voice and similar tasks that cause problems for traditional computers. And its existence proves the principle that one day it will be possible to create devices with energy efficiency, close to the energy efficiency of the brain. Particularly curious, these advantages look against the background of the approaching miniaturization limit and the efficiency of silicon microprocessors. "Moore's law is dead, semiconductors can no longer grow smaller, and people start to say, what are we supposed to do," says Alex Nugent, CEO of Knowm, a neuromorphic computation company that did not participate in the University of California project. "I like this idea, this direction. Conventional computing platforms are a billion times less efficient. "