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A new computing technique that uses a network of chaotic elements to "evolve" its answers could provide an alternative to the digital computing systems widely used today. The technique may be suited for optical computing using ultra-fast chaotic lasers and computing with silicon/neural tissue hybrid circuitry.
The system, developed by researchers at the Georgia Institute of Technology's Applied Chaos Laboratory, so far demonstrates an ability to handle a wide range of common operations. These include addition and multiplication, as well as Boolean logic and more sophisticated operations like finding the least common multiplier in a sequence of integers. Because it depends on interaction among its coupled elements, the system is naturally parallel.
For years, scientists have observed the rich variety of behavioral patterns created by chaotic systems, including those found in living organisms. Georgia Tech professor William Ditto, along with collaborator Sudeshna Sinha of the Institute of Mathematical Sciences, Madras, India, reasoned that these natural chaotic systems would have been eliminated through evolution unless they actually served a purpose.
Ditto and Sinha devised an experiment to see if a simple network of chaotic computer elements could be made to handle computations. By using an adaptive connecting mechanism that would open whenever an element exceeded a certain critical value, they joined the chaotic elements into a lattice. The mechanism was designed so that the researchers could set a wide range of...