I think a computer architecture concept intended to reduce power consumption may also have a lot of potential for hardware-level artificial intelligence implementations.
Palem's team has designed a format for embedded chips that are capable of going with a hunch rather than performing painfully precise calculations. Early testing indicates that the chips can extend battery life and, as a bonus, may also enable mobile devices to run more complex applications, since an awful lot of time is currently wasted in churning out those exact calculations. ...A lot of computational power is used in AI to simulate probabalistic unreliability, but it would be pretty neat if we could get it built in on the hardware.In conventional computer circuits, each single bit of information is represented by a 0 or a 1. This information is definite; a circuit is either on or off -- the answer is either yes or no.
But with Probabilistic Bits, or PBits, chips, a circuit can be "on" with a high degree of certainty, but not with 100 percent certainty, said Palem, whose team developed the PBits prototype.
"In the chips being built today, the hardware obeys the software instructions absolutely, even though the application software does not require such precision," said Palem. "So the simple idea that we have is to make the following connection: If probabilistic algorithms do not need the hardware to be reliable, then why invest a lot of money and time in making hardware reliable?"
(HT: GeekPress.)
but we already have this. "bits" on a computer aren't set in stone; a voltage bias is created, and anything less than .6 is measured as 0; anything over 3.5 is measured as 1.
further, we have cosmic rays that flip bits, etc. etc. and we have error correction everywhere.
hardware isn't made to be perfectly reliable in the first place; it's already got trade offs. How much easier is it going to be to make things slightly less well, but not too-terribly less well? anyway, it's silly. probabilistic algorithms already exist and are easy to code. if you really want to get some value out of your probalistic stuff, make qubits happen.
A: I'm afraid you're mistaken. Hardware is made to perform consistently, and when bits get flipped incorrectly the system generally fails catastrophically. Probabalistic algorithms exist, but they'd run a lot faster on probabalistic hardware.
As far as I know, we already have things that turn on with some degree of probability, and they all say "Microsoft" or "Ford" on them.
;)