Scientists at the Energy Department’s Argonne National Laboratory have pioneered a cutting-edge neuromorphic computer chip—modeled off the brains of bees, fruit flies and other insects—that can rapidly learn, adapt and use substantially less power than its conventional computer chip counterparts.
The physicist leading an interdisciplinary team that developed the state-of-the-art design recently spoke to Nextgov about the chips’ potential to advance artificial intelligence.
“If we start from a biology standpoint, we use ourselves, humans, as a model for intelligent systems, of course. But there are many other branches that evolution has taken where you can sort of reach big computational power,” Angel Yanguas-Gil, principal materials scientist in Argonne’s Applied Materials division, said. “Insects are one of these areas.”
Limitations in contemporary computing motivated the team to look for alternative scientific approaches to apply to microelectronics and the materials that make them up. Over the past 70 years, humans have gotten much better at making physical computing components and it’s at a point where it’s becoming difficult to continuously improve physical devices, he said. Personal devices are simultaneously getting smaller and smarter, and industry watchers anticipate an impending boom in smart sensors that will require less power to compute. And machine learning and deep neural networks are also evolving, but Yanguas-Gil noted they are generally narrowly trained and limited in flexibility.
But where traditional AI and computing systems fall short, the complexities and viability of insects offer a good model system and a modern sense of promise.
“I tend to see an insect as an autonomous system that consumes milliwatts of power, and that in the case of the bee, they can go miles and come back, they essenti ..
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