Memsistors

Another slack day. I did a minimal effort to sustain all my ghastly habits. I stayed home all day. I didn't even go out to see if I had any snail mail in my rural delivery box out on the paved road. The only exercise I got today was done strictly to relieve my guilt about being so lazy. I just got and danced to the rhythm of the drum machine for maybe two minutes and figured that oughta keep me alive another five minutes. So much for aerobics today. I did go outside and walk up and down the outside stairs a couple of times.

I've been so lazy I haven't even changed the drum beat from it's default setting. I've had it playing 001 8BeatModern for some time now, and ignored it for the most part. I spent a good part of my slovenly day checking out the other sounds on my keyboard. Some of them are very good. Some of the choices have the appellation "sweet" attached to an instrument like 074 Sweet! Clarinet, and 080 Breathy Tenor Sax. I understand why they call them sweet. Just by playing some simple tune using these instrument samples I can make them sound real good. Have I mentioned how much I'm enjoying my fairly new Yamaha Portable Grand digital piano?

Most of the time I use it I've got it set on the Grand Piano setting that it's famous for. It's got this black button, see, that immediately changes all the setting so that it plays the digitally sampled sounds of Yamaha's acoustic grand piano. It sounds a lot like an acoustic piano, a very expensive grand piano, and I never have to get it tuned. That's a big selling point with me. I'm not your musical instrument tuning fanatic some people are.

I'm still thinking about this new electronic discovery announced by the HP Labs today. I seem to have intuited it was a big deal when i read the early morning article. By lunch there were all sorts of highly complimentary accolades going around. If the hype is only half-way right (they literally have working prototypes) it's gonna change the digital revolution more than any event since the invention of the transistor. Maybe even more.

The Hewlett-Packard home page announced the results, and the guy who lead the research team readily acknowledged that the possibility had been worked out mathematically nearly forty years ago by a professor at Berkley. He also stated in no uncertain terms that the "memristor" was a discovery and not an invention. How could it not have already existed if it rang a bell with me.

I'm not sure how it rang a bell with me, and I don't know what that means either. It was the comments about how it not only remember what it's contents were in the present, but it was capable of remembering it's previous contents, and it was further capable of comparing its former occupant with it's present occupant, and that's what makes it capable of simple consciousness.

I don't know if I read this right, but it the articles I've been reading off and on all day about it was that it could do comparative operations such as required in face-reading without any software to direct it's purpose. Granted, I don't know what the hell that means, but if it's the missing link in electronics the way it's being claimed, the possibilities can't even be addressed yet.

If nothing else got done today I did do a lotta reading on memristors. It's sure something to look forward to as this technology comes into it's own. I don't know how this will affect the future of quantum computers. They may be circumvented altogether.

The guy who worked out the mathematics in 1971, Leon Chua, stated that the electronic theorists had ignored the possibilities of memristors existing and scoffed at the notion that a prototype could ever be constructed. The work done at the HP labs proved he was right and they were wrong. It's startling to me to consider what has transpired to date without memristors. Artificial intelligence is about to make a giant leap forward.