A Survey of Bio-Inspired and Other Alternative Architectures

• In this chapter I have provided a brief and somewhat superficial survey of the specialized hardware developed over the last 20 years to support neurobiological models of computation. I then looked briefly at current efforts and speculated on how such hardware, especially when implemented in nanoscale electronics, could offer unprecedented compute density, possibly leading to new capabilities in computational intelligence. Also, biologically inspired models seem to be a better match to nano-scale circuits. The mix of continued Moore’s law scaling, models from computational neuroscience, and molecular scale technology portends a potential paradigm shift in how computing is done. Among other things the future of computing is probably not about discrete logic, but about the encoding, learning, and performing inference over stochastic variables. There could be a wide range of applications for devices like this in robotics, the reduction and compression of widely distributed sensor data, power management, etc. One of the leading lights of the first computer revolution saw this clearly. At the IEEE Centenary in 1984 (“The Next 100 Years,” IEEE Technical Convocation), Dr. Robert Noyce, co-founder of Intel and co-inventor of the Integrated Circuit, said: Until now we have been going the other way; that is, in order to understand the brain we have used the computer as a model for it. Perhaps it is time to reverse this reasoning: to understand where we should go with the computer, we should look to the brain for some clues.

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