The Memristor
Some call memristor "The Fourth Element" because after the widely known elements resistor, capacitor, inductor, the memristor would be the the fourth, and in a way, the missing element. Its founder actually discovered it because he postulated it had to be there; the first three are all results of various relations between voltage, current, charge, flux; one relation and its circuit element was missing - that turned out to be the memristor. And the last element added is perhaps the most important one with far-reaching consequences as it can point to the way nature really computes.
Theory published in 1971, manufactured 4 the first time in 2008. It's architecture is a collection of differential equations! See Dynamical Systems with Applications using Python by Lynch, pg. 65 for an intro on its mathemamatics. You can apparently build computers with this thing. Memory and processing on the same unit!
The area of research for memristors is named non-linear electronics. In fact, triggering chaos in circuits is a test for presence of memristors! Apparently found in nature too.
Nature article
The first programmable memristor chip,
(Because it's year 2019, the article goes on and on abt f--ing machine learning, but u can read that as "scientific computation").
From what I read so far, it seems memristor allow analog computation, not just binary. Here is another article talking abt how memristor can model the brain in a better way, almost naturally.
"A new electronic device can developed at the University of Michigan can directly model the behaviors of a synapse, which is a connection between two neurons.
For the first time, the way that neurons share or compete for resources can be explored in hardware without the need for complicated circuits"
I always thought human brain is analog.
Maybe the entire von Neumann architecture will be overturned at some point? VN arch talks about memory and processing as seperate units.
It's funny I kept thinking abt analog circuits and how they can compute DE's (as they are modeled with DE's). And how our brains are analog. This is the continuation of that thought; apparently we can now create analog computers that can be faster and smaller.
Forget the transistor, hail the memristor!