Un-0: Generating Images with Coupled Oscillators

When I first learned about computer science at the age of 11 or so (and in 1982 or so) the first page of the text book put digital and analogue computers on what seemed to be an equal footing. And then proceeded to ignore the latter for the rest of the book. Apart from a few notable exceptions ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phillips_Machine ) I've often wondered about analogue computing.

	▲	seanmcdirmid 21 minutes ago \| parent [-]
		At the end of my undergrad, I remember a UW professor being poached by intel to work on analogue computing research project, the chair of the department at the time said that it was an opportunity that might not ever happen again and he had to take. I don’t think it went anywhere (since I never heard of intel coming out with a product), but I at least knew there was an attempt.

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WhitneyLand 22 minutes ago | parent | prev | next [-]

It’s not clear to me how this would ever be practical since it seems dependent on n^2 scaling.

You’ve got to wonder when you have an image generation demo why would you possibly have 64 x 64 pixel output as your demo?

If I’m understanding this properly to generate a 4K image, you need like 5 trillion point to point connections on the chip. Even if power use from the oscillators is zero that’s going to be an issue.

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ttul 5 minutes ago | parent [-]

What they are trying to achieve is to demonstrate that the coupling approach works in a simulated physics environment (O(n^2) as you point out) so that they can then build CMOS circuits that create actual oscillators and then let the laws of physics do the computation. This is a very bold vision!

	▲	ttul 3 minutes ago \| parent [-]
		And anyone who has done an introductory course in VLSI design would know that capacitance (coupling) is something you usually want to get rid of. However, all kinds of amazing analog circuits have been developed over the decades that exploit coupling effects. So, their idea is not outlandish at all.

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TaupeRanger an hour ago | parent | prev | next [-]

Really interesting - if I understood the article correctly, they're simulating this on conventional hardware, so in order to get the proposed benefits, it would need to be implemented in some other electronic medium.

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ainch an hour ago | parent | prev | next [-]

This method is cool and the post explains it well. It would, however, be good to get more detail on the energy efficiency they flag as their motivation: is this model actually more energy efficient than the comparators they highlight?

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italiansolider 44 minutes ago | parent | prev | next [-]

Readers care, this requires a nice amount of physics knowledge to really understand. Not too advanced but still, physics.

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NopIdoN 2 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

> However, the trade-off with our approach is that it requires a more complex loss that operates given only generated samples.

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fusionadvocate 2 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

Is this somewhat related to reservoir computing?

	▲	fc417fc802 2 hours ago \| parent [-]
		(Disclaimer, not my area of expertise.) It appears to be adjacent but more general. There's an entire collection of methods (including reservoir computing) that conceptually resemble or are based on physical systems in one way or another. This appears to be an attempt to develop a new method that natively takes place as a physical process that we could readily implement in hardware.

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OutOfHere an hour ago | parent | prev | next [-]

Can this even make an image having more than one "class"? Can it make an image of an astronaut riding a horse on the moon?

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mrr7337 3 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

I didn't really understand anything...lgtm