DARPA funds Mr Spock on a Chip • The Register

DARPA funds Mr Spock on a Chip • The Register: "The US Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency financed the basic research necessary to create a processor that thinks in terms of probabilities instead of the certainties of ones and zeros. And now Lyric Semiconductor, the spin-off from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology where the work was done, is going to spend the next couple of years building a commercial probability processor called the GP5.

Why do we care about a processor that calculates probabilities instead manipulating of data to get a certainty? Because an increasing number of applications in far-ranging fields are about trying to figure out the probability of something happening and acting on those probabilities.

'Digital processors are not really equipped to handle these algorithms,' explains David Reynolds, co-founder and vice president of product development at Lyric, which comes out of stealth mode today. 'So we have been rebuilding probability computing from the gate level all the way up to the processor.'"