Computational properties of use to biological organisms or to the construction of computers can emerge as collective properties of systems having a large number of simple equivalent components (or neurons). The physical meaning of content-addressable memory is described by an appropriate phase space flow of the state of a system. A model of such a system is given, based on aspects of neurobiology but readily adapted to integrated circuits. The collective properties of this model produce a content-addressable memory which correctly yields an entire memory from any subpart of sufficient size. The algorithm for the time evolution of the state of the system is based on asynchronous parallel processing. Additional emergent collective properties include some capacity for generalization, familiarity recognition, categorization, error correction, and time sequence retention. The collective properties are only weakly sensitive to details of the modeling or the failure of individual devices.
Author(s): Anthony Hey
Series: Frontiers in Physics
Edition: 1
Publisher: CRC Press
Year: 2002
Language: English
Pages: 464
Tags: Computer Science
Cover
Title Page
Copyright
Contents
List of Contributors
Feynman and Computation: An Overview by Anthony J.G. Hey
I. Feynman's Course on Computation
1. Feynman and Computation (John J. Hopfteld)
2. Neural Networks and Physical Systems with Emergent Collective Computational Abilities (John J. Hopfield)
3. Feynman as a Colleague (Carver A. Mead)
4. Collective Electrodynamics I (Carver A. Mead)
5. A Memory (Gerald Jay Sussman)
6. Numercial Evidence that the Motion of Pluto is Chaotic (Gerald Jay Sussman and Jack Wisdom)
II. Reducing the Size
7. There's Plenty of Room at the Bottom (Richard P. Feynman)
8. Information is Inevitably Physical (Rolf Landauer)
9. Scaling of MOS Technology to Submicrometer Feature Sizes (Carver A. Mead)
10. Richard Feynman and Cellular Vacuum (Marvin Minsky)
III. Quantum Limits
11. Simulating Physics with Computers (Richard P. Feynman)
12. Quantum Robots (Paul Benioff)
13. Quantum Information Theory (Charles H. Bennett)
14. Quantum Computation (Richard J. Hughes)
IV. Parallel Computation
15. Computing Machines in the Future (Richard P. Feynman)
16. Internetics: Technologies, Applications and Academic Fields (Geoffrey C. Fox)
17. Richard Feynman and the Connection Machine (W. Daniel Hillis)
18. Crystalline Computation (Norman H. Margolus)
V. Fundamentals
19. Information, Physics, Quantum: The Search for Links (John Archibald Wheeler)
20. Feynman, Barton and the Reversible Schrödinger Difference Equation (Ed Fredkin)
21. Action, or the Fungibility of Computation (Tommaso Toffoli)
22. Algorithmic Randomness, Physical Entropy, Measurements, and the Demon of Choice (Wojciech Zurek)
Index
Name Index
