The next generation of neural networks could live in hardware

Felix Petersen, who did this work as a postdoctoral researcher at Stanford University, has a strategy for making that happen. He designed networks composed of logic gates, which are some of the basic building blocks of computer chips. Made up of a few transistors apiece, logic gates accept two bits--1s or 0s--as inputs and, according to a rule determined by their specific pattern of transistors, output a single bit. Just like perceptrons, logic gates can be chained up into networks. And running logic-gate networks is cheap, fast, and easy: in his talk at the Neural Information Processing Systems (NeurIPS) conference, Petersen said that they consume less energy than perceptron networks by a factor of hundreds of thousands.