A Chip That Digests Data and Calculates the Odds
By ASHLEE VANCE
NYT
Complex as they may seem, traditional computers deal in a simple art. They rely on tiny switches that turn on and off, producing the streams of ones and zeros that software eventually translates into something meaningful to a human.
Some computer scientists find solace in the degree of certainty that comes from trading in yes-or-no operations.
Lyric Semiconductor, a start-up that emerged from work at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, looks to forgo this certainty in favor of probability. It unveiled plans this week to build a chip that can compute likelihoods. Such technology may help figure out which book someone will want to buy on Amazon.com or help create a better gene-sequencing machine.
“We decided there are lots of probability problems out there that are so important they deserved their own hardware,” said Ben Vigoda, the co-founder and chief executive at Lyric.
(More here.)
NYT
Complex as they may seem, traditional computers deal in a simple art. They rely on tiny switches that turn on and off, producing the streams of ones and zeros that software eventually translates into something meaningful to a human.
Some computer scientists find solace in the degree of certainty that comes from trading in yes-or-no operations.
Lyric Semiconductor, a start-up that emerged from work at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, looks to forgo this certainty in favor of probability. It unveiled plans this week to build a chip that can compute likelihoods. Such technology may help figure out which book someone will want to buy on Amazon.com or help create a better gene-sequencing machine.
“We decided there are lots of probability problems out there that are so important they deserved their own hardware,” said Ben Vigoda, the co-founder and chief executive at Lyric.
(More here.)
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