mhardlion

MIT researchers have developed a novel “photonic” chip that uses light instead of electricity — and consumes relatively little power in the process. The chip could be used to process massive neural networks millions of times more efficiently than today’s classical computers do. Neural networks are machine-learning models that are widely used for such tasks as robotic object identification, natural language processing, drug development, medical imaging, and powering driverless cars. Novel optical neural networks, which use optical phenomena to accelerate computation, can run much faster and more efficiently than their electrical counterparts. But as traditional and optical neural networks grow more complex, they eat up tons of power. To tackle that issue, researchers and major tech companies — including Google, IBM, and Tesla — have developed “AI accelerators,” specialized chips that improve the speed and efficiency of training and testing neural networks. For electrical chips, i...

The use of Bitcoin causes around 22 megatons in CO2 emissions annually -- comparable to the total emissions of cities such as Hamburg or Las Vegas. That is the conclusion of the most detailed analysis to date of the cryptocurrency's carbon footprint. For their study, an interdisciplinary team of researchers at the Technical University of Munich (TUM) analyzed such data as the IPO filings of hardware manufacturers and the IP addresses of Bitcoin "miners. Read the full news here; https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2019/06/190613104533.htm

Researchers have developed a new method for using lasers to create tiny lattice waves inside silicon crystals that can encode quantum information. By taking advantage of existing silicon hardware, this work may greatly reduce the cost of future quantum computers for cryptographic and optimization applications. Source: University of Tsukuba

A computer simulation or a computer model is a computer program that attempts to simulate an abstract model of a particular system. Computer simulations have become a useful part of mathematical modelling of many natural systems in physics, chemistry and biology, human systems in economics, psychology, and social science and in the process of engineering new technology, to gain insight into the operation of those systems. Traditionally, the formal modeling of systems has been via a mathematical model, which attempts to find analytical solutions to problems which enables the prediction of the behaviour of the system from a set of parameters and initial conditions. Computer simulations build on, and are a useful adjunct to purely mathematical models in science, technology and entertainment. The reliability and the trust people put in computer simulations depends on the validity of the simulation model.

A new study by a pair of researchers in the US and Japan has found that, when gravity is combined with quantum mechanics, symmetry is not possible. "Many physicists believe that there must a beautiful set of laws in Nature and that one way to quantify the beauty is by symmetry. Some of the symmetries may be hidden in our world, but they should manifest themselves if we look at Nature at a more fundamental level. We showed that this expectation is wrong once we take into account the gravity," said Hirosi Ooguri, Director of the Kavli Institute for the Physics and Mathematics of the Universe, and one of the paper authors. There are four kinds of fundamental forces in Nature: electromagnetism, strong force, weak force, and gravity. Of the four, the gravity is the only one still unexplainable at the quantum level. Researchers believe the holographic principle is an important hint to combine the gravity and quantum mechanics successfully. A hologram makes three-dimensional ima...