this article show that on the basis of this new paradigm one can now train a stereotypical recurrent network of integrate-and-fire neurons to carry out basically any real-time computation on spike trains, in fact several such real-time computations in parallel

Copying and counting are useful primitive operations for computation and construction. We have made DNA crystals that copy and crystals that count as they grow. For counting, 16 oligonucleotides assemble into four DNA Wang tiles that subsequently crystallize on a polymeric nucleating scaffold strand, arranging themselves in a binary counting pattern that could serve as a template for a molecular electronic demultiplexing circuit. Although the yield of counting crystals is low, and per-tile error rates in such crystals is roughly 10%, this work demonstrates the potential of algorithmic self-assembly to create complex nanoscale patterns of technological interest. A subset of the tiles for counting form information-bearing DNA tubes that copy bit strings from layer to layer along their length. The challenge of engineering complex devices at the nanometer scale has been approached from two radically different directions. In top-down synthesis, information about the desired structure is imposed by an external apparatus, as in photolithography. In bottom-up synthesis, structure arises spontaneously due to chemical and physical forces intrinsic to the molecular components themselves. A significant challenge for bottom-up techniques is how to design

This article initiates a rigorous theoretical analysis of the computational power of circuits that employ modules for computing winner-take-all. Computational models that involve competitive stages have so far been neglected in computational complexity theory, although they are widely used in computational brain models, artificial neural networks, and analog VLSI. Our theoretical analysis shows that winner-take-all is a surprisingly powerful computational module in comparison with threshold gates (= McCulloch-Pitts neurons) and sigmoidal gates. We prove an optimal quadratic lower bound for computing winner-take-all in any feedforward circuit consisting of threshold gates. In addition we show that arbitrary continuous functions can be approximated by circuits employing a single soft winner-take-all gate as their only nonlinear operation. Our

We review Models of Computation (MoC) and organize them with respect to the time abstraction they use. We distinguish between continuous time, discrete time, synchronous and untimed MoCs. System level models serve a variety of objectives with partially contradicting requirements. Consequently we argue that different MoCs are necessary for the various tasks and phases in the design of an embedded system. Moreover, different MoCs have to be integrated to provide a coherent system modeling and analysis environment. We discuss the relation between some popular languages and the reviewed MoCs to find that a given MoC is offered by many languages and a single language can support multiple MoCs. We contend that it is of importance for the quality of tools and overall design productivity, which abstraction levels and which primitive operators are provided in a language. However, we also observe that there are various flexible ways to do this, e.g. by way of heterogeneous frameworks, coordination languages and embedding of different MoCs in the same language.

A key challenge facing nanotechnologies is learning to control uncertainty introduced by stochastic self-assembly. In this article, we explore architectural and manufacturing strategies to cope with this uncertainty when assembling nanoarrays, crossbars composed of two orthogonal sets of parallel nanowires (NWs) that are differentiated at their time of manufacture. NW deposition is a stochastic process and the NW encodings present in an array cannot be known in advance. We explore the reliable construction of memories from stochastically assembled arrays. This is accomplished by describing several families of NW encodings and developing strategies to map external binary addresses onto internal NW encodings using programmable circuitry. We explore a variety of different mapping strategies and develop probabilistic methods of analysis. This is the first article that makes clear the wide range of choices that are available.

We introduce total wire length as salient complexity measure for an analysis of the circuit complexity of sensory processing in biological neural systems and neuromorphic engineering. This new complexity measure is applied to a set of basic computational problems that apparently need to be solved by circuits for translation- and scale-invariant sensory processing.

It has previously been shown that generic cortical microcircuit models can perform complex real-time computations on continuous input streams, provided that these computations can be carried out with a rapidly fading memory. We investigate the computational capability of such circuits in the more realistic case where not only readout neurons, but in addition a few neurons within the circuit, have been trained for specific tasks. This is essentially equivalent to the case where the output of trained readout neurons is fed back into the circuit. We show that this new model overcomes the limitation of a rapidly fading memory. In fact, we prove that in the idealized case without noise it can carry out any conceivable digital or analog computation on time-varying inputs. But even with noise, the resulting computational model can perform a large class of biologically relevant real-time computations that require a nonfading memory. We demonstrate these computational implications of feedback both theoretically, and through computer simulations of detailed cortical microcircuit models that are subject to noise and have complex inherent dynamics. We show that the application of simple learning procedures (such as linear regression or perceptron learning) to a few neurons enables such circuits to represent time over behaviorally relevant long time spans, to integrate evidence from incoming spike trains over longer periods of time, and to process new information contained in such spike trains in diverse ways according to the current internal state of the circuit. In particular we show that such generic cortical microcircuits with feedback provide a new model for working memory that is consistent with a large set of biological constraints.

The Hierarchical Memory Model (HMM) of computation is similar to the standard Random Access Machine (RAM) model except that the HMM has a non-uniform memory organized in a hierarchy of levels numbered 1 through h. The cost of accessing a memory location increases with the level number, and accesses to memory locations belonging to the same level cost the same. Formally, the cost of a single access to the memory location at address a is given by (a), where : N ! N is the memory cost function, and the h distinct values of model the different levels of the memory hierarchy. We study the problem of constructing and storing a binary search tree (BST) of minimum cost, over a set of keys, with probabilities for successful and unsuccessful searches, on the HMM with an arbitrary number of memory levels, and for the special case h = 2. While the problem of constructing optimum binary search trees has been well studied for the standard RAM model, the additional parameter for the HMM inc...

We investigate the computational complexity of an optically inspired model of computation. The model is called the continuous space machine and operates in discrete timesteps over a number of two-dimensional complex-valued images of constant size and arbitrary spatial resolution. We define a number of optically inspired complexity measures and data representations for the model. We show the growth of each complexity measure under each of the model's operations. We characterise the power of an important discrete restriction of the model. Parallel time on this variant of the model is shown to correspond, within a polynomial, to sequential space on Turing machines, thus verifying the parallel computation thesis. We also give a characterisation of the class NC. As a result the model has computational power equivalent to that of many well-known parallel models. These characterisations give a method to translate parallel algorithms to optical algorithms and facilitate the application of the complexity theory toolbox to optical computers. Finally we show that another variation on the model is very powerful

We present lower bounds on the computational power of an optical model of computation called the C2-CSM.