Ask HN: What excites you most about Neuromorphic Hardware?

[hsikka]

I just finished https://arxiv.org/abs/1705.06963 and was pleasantly surprised at state of neurotrophic computing. Specifically, the use of organic materials to build robust, low power networks that get past the von Neumann bottleneck and allow us to incorporate new levels of sensing into our environment and lives seems extraordinary. TPUs and chips are obviously interesting for orgs like google, but what about synthetic clusters of neurons integrated into our environment? How significant could that be?

[modeless]

Neuromorphic hardware is barking up the wrong tree if you ask me. What excites me is not hardware that works like brains work, but software that does what brains can do. If you want to fly, don't try to build a bird. Build an airplane.

[vinay427]

I would agree if the goal is to fly. For some researchers, however, the goal is actually to apply neuromorphic hardware to humans, i.e. to build a bird rather than just to fly.

[hackandtrip]

In a sense, aren't we trying to take inspiration from a model evolved in many million years? We are trying to build an airplane taking inspiration from a bird. Also, emulating the way brain work can be seen as one of the many paths towards AGI, can't it? Even if, AGI speaking, to my understanding the computation speed is not the problem.

[stealthcat]

Remember when William Ditto actually made wetware computing using live neuron cells (yep living cells), but he saw the potential of such computer and stopped research. Instead he focused in chaos computing, and founded Chaologix, where he made analog circuit that can transform to different logic gates very fast. But recently they are acquired by ARM.

The only company I know that is doing wetware computing today is koniku.io though they are super secretive about their progress. And they only made sensors for now.

Now we are trying to emulate plasticity of growing brain with rigid, solid state electronics. I'm not that positive, so stay to deep learning and backprop for now...

[hsikka]

Whoah this is super interesting, do you have any papers or research you can point me to? I'd love to learn more about this because i'm a neuroscience and AI student.

[allanmacgregor]

Do you have any more details on koniku.io or similar processes? I find the subject interesting, while other people on the thread might be right and is actually barking at the wrong tree that doesn't make it less interesting.

[j1vms]

In case anyone is interested, Carver Mead's 1990 seminal paper on the subject [0]. It's a fairly accessible read, and covers the power/computational efficiency trade-offs on the spectrum from natural, biological systems to manufactured analog vs. digital electronic systems.

[0] https://web.stanford.edu/group/brainsinsilicon/documents/Mea...

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carver_Mead

[alok-g]

PS: I did not read the paper again.

Most of such analysis reporting brain to be more power efficient than computers talk about energy it would require to emulate brain operations in silicon. That does not sound like a fair comparison. How about the energy a brain would need to emulate a computer chip, say multiplying a billion floating point numbers?

For a fair comparison, we must do a comparison for the same neutral task, one that both machines and brains can do. It's would need discussions to define what would this be since capabilites of each still show wide differences.

Likewise, some texts assume each synapse to carry a memory of say a byte, and then claim our brain has a memory of about 10^15 bytes. A human brain cannot actually recall all that information, the latter is estimated to be at about 10-30 MB only (per an old book I read).

[gisely]

Energy efficiency! Our brains vastly outperform existing hardware while using less energy and producing less heat. Once we understand more about what makes them capable of that we will be able to push hardware well beyond its current thermal-related problems.

[alok-g]

Can you share some references. See my comment on this page here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18425019 Thanks.

[yters]

I've seen use of rat brains to control devices. Is that considered neuromorphic? Has there been an attempt to use human brain matter in such devices?

[OJFord]

Professor Kevin Warwick is at least one person to work on 'rat brain robots'.

I recall he also implanted something in himself to allow controlling other things with normal arm movements, which is sort of using 'human brain matter in such devices', though in situ.

[jonmrodriguez]

Don't you think this would constitute slavery? Shouldn't this be extremely illegal?

[geuis]

At a high level, I think the top level advantages potentially are in power saving and flexibility when working on machine learning problems.

The brain is very power efficient compared to modern computers. Incorporating more “organic” structured can lead to much greater power efficiency.

As more is learned about efficient neural network models, implementing them in hardware will lead to much faster and cheaper learning models.

[vinceguidry]

Really the only thing that interests me is being able to control a computer with thought, if I can look at a screen and 'click' in my head, to me that's basically Star Trek utopia. Having a thought-controlled keyboard would be awesome too, but not nearly as cool as a mouse.

The rest of it can go in the bin, but I'm sure some of it might be neat.

[rs23296008n1]

The name. Branding for this is great. The technical side also has huge potential.

(No this isn't sarcasm or some kind of hipster in-joke)

[orliesaurus]

can someone explain it to the uninitiated?

[fulafel]

Interesting that in Fig. 10, half of the HW implementations are analog or partially analog.

[marmaduke]

If we learn how to program them reliably it’s huge.

[o_wilson]

Wow bit of ‘light reading’ needed before answering this question. :-p

[gervase]

Note that the linked article is only about 22 pages, followed by 2682 (!) references.

[Vanit]

I for one welcome our new Typhon overlords.

[FlowNote]

Binding them to Neanderthal organiods. Yes, we have plans to do exactly this.

If you'd like to be part of the wildness of that idea and have neuromorphic and/or spiking neural network and/or genetics experience, send an e-mail to [email protected]

[jonmrodriguez]

Patrick, don't you think you should reflect on what you are doing before taking sentient neurons and forcing them to live their entire lives confined inside a machine, with no possibility of escape? How would you enjoy being born into such captivity?

What would you do if you were experiencing an endless state of pain but lacked the language ability to communicate your pain to your owner?

I have written to the Vatican already suggesting that they push to make neural slavery illegal, as it violates the principle of the dignity of sentient life. I hope you will please reflect on what you are doing and stop doing it voluntarily instead of waiting for the laws to change and make what you are doing illegal. Whether legal or not, any form of slavery is immoral.