Scientists from the Netherlands and South Korea have just built a device called an “iontronic memristor (memory resistor),” or in other words, an artificial synapse. This device, a little wider than a human hair, imitates the part of the brain that helps us think and learn. This is not the first time that scientists have tried to tackle creating a device that can resemble the thinking of the human brain, but this one is special, because it is not built like the others, it is built like our brains.
So what is this brain-like device and why is it so special? Get ready for a scientific talk. The iontronic memristor has a conical, cone-shaped microfluidic channel, inside which is a salt solution (potassium chloride) dissolved in water. Yes, it’s literally just salt and water.
When the device receives an electrical signal, ions in the water solution move through the channel and change position, and this movement affects the density and conductivity of the ions. This basically changes the way the memristor can conduct electricity, which is similar to the way our brain cells wire stronger or weaker based on our experiences.
This might be the closest thing yet to how our brains work in an artificial environment, and it’s different from previous attempts at the base because it’s made entirely of water and salt rather than silicon and metals.
Although memristors have been used in several conventional platforms, they are different from the human brain because they depend on a single source of information (such as electrons or holes) and only respond to electrical inputs. This differs from the way synapses work in our brains, as they can rely on electrical and chemical signals to do the job.
Current applications of artificial intelligence, even the most advanced, do not have the ability to think independently like human brains do. Meanwhile, large language models (LLMs), although they may sound like us, are just a collection of words that other people (and machines) have said. Their ability to create comes from learning from humans and not from their own ability to think.
The research, led by doctoral researcher Tim Kamsma, is the joint result of work carried out by Utrecht University in the Netherlands and Sogang University in South Korea. It is the first of its kind to use fluidic ion channels to emulate the complex fluid mechanisms in the brain; However, despite this leap, aqueous neuromorphic devices such as iontronic memristors are still in their infancy, and their use to build neuromorphic computers remains a work in progress.
While we’re a long way off, building devices like this is a stepping stone to the next era of AI, something other scientists have tried to achieve in other ways, such as using honey.
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