“We have mimicked how neurons behave in the brain,” announces an international research team from Japan and Michigan Tech. They’ve built an “evolutionary circuit” in a molecular computer that evolves to solve complex problems, and the molecular computer also exhibits brain-like massive parallel processing!
“The neat part is, approximately 300 molecules talk with each other at a time during information processing,” says physicist Ranjit Pati of Michigan Tech. When viewed with a scanning tunneling microscope, the evolving patterns bear an uncanny resemblance to the human brain as seen by a Functional MRI.
Using the electrically-charged tip of a tunneling microscope, they’ve individually set molecules to a desired state, essentially writing data to the system. And while conventional computers are typically built using two-state (0, 1) transistors, the molecular layer is built using a hexagonal molecule, and can switch among four conducting states — 0, 1, 2 and 3, suggesting it may ultimately have more AI potential than quantum computing.”
