Why a Chip That's Bad at Math Can Help Computers Tackle Harder Problems

Your math teacher lied to you. Sometimes getting your sums wrong is a good thing. So says Joseph Bates, cofounder and CEO of Singular Computing, a company whose computer chips are hardwired to be incapable of performing mathematical calculations correctly. Ask it to add 1 and 1 and you will get answers like 2.01 or 1.98. Pentagon research agency DARPA funded the creation of Singular's chip because that fuzziness can be an asset when it comes to some of the hardest problems for computers, such as making sense of video or other messy real world data. "Just because the hardware is sucky doesn't mean the software's result has to be," says Bates.