In chaotic computing, anarchy rules OK

Push a microchip to the limits and it performs in ways

unimaginable with ordinary silicon, says Duncan Graham-Rowe

Duncan Graham-Rowe

BEACH holiday a washout? Camping trip cut short by gales? Cheer up -

every storm cloud really does have a silver lining. It seems that the
unpredictable behaviour of our weather could hold the key to the
future of computing.

If you don't believe it, talk to William Ditto, a physicist at the

University of Florida in Gainesville. Along with a team of colleagues
in India and the US, Ditto has spent more than 10 years conjuring up
the electronic equivalent of chaotic weather systems and harnessing
them to build the next generation of computer processors.

In the precisely designed world of computer chips, this is an

unconventional approach: any chaotic behaviour is usually seen as a
Bad Thing. After all, there's little point building a chip if its
carefully regulated signals decay into anarchy as soon as it is
switched on. However, Ditto and his colleagues believe that such
anarchy can yield huge rewards, if used in the right way.

To prove it, they have harnessed chaotic oscillations to create

"chameleon" logic circuits that can switch their behaviour on the fly.
In the space of a nanosecond or two, these morphing circuits can
transform themselves from a processor unit, say, into a graphics
controller. A "chaotic" computer built from circuits like these would
be able to make far better use of its precious hardware than today's
machines. By throwing all its computational firepower at the task in
hand, and then reassigning it the instant a different task comes
along, chaotic processor chips would be hugely more powerful than
conventional chips of the same size. They would even be able to repair
themselves.

Ditto has founded a company to commercialise the technology, but in

the meantime he is pursuing another application. His team has come up
with a way to use these circuits to store data, creating digital
memory that is far more compact than conventional memory and which can
also retrieve data more quickly. This makes it perfect for systems
that handle huge databases, such as internet search engines, Ditto
says. The fruits of this work should go live this year, in the form of
a chaotic search engine for a commercial customer's private use.

The idea of chaotic computing emerged from a chance meeting in 1997.

Ditto, then working at Georgia Institute of Technology in Atlanta, was
at a conference in Bangalore, India, when he bumped into Sudeshna
Sinha, who was studying non-linear dynamics at the Institute of
Mathematical Sciences in Chennai. As they talked, it emerged that they
were both intrigued by other researchers' attempts to adapt quantum
mechanics and DNA chemistry to perform traditional computing tasks,
and they began to wonder whether chaos could offer any advantages.

Chaotic behaviour is all around us - in the way that rivers flow and
weather evolves, for example. While the behaviour of such systems is
inherently unpredictable over all but the shortest timescales, they
are not random. Their unpredictability arises because they are
sensitive to the smallest of influences. Tiny fluctuations get
amplified and eventually dominate the system. As chaos pioneer Edward
Lorenz put it, the flap of a butterfly's wings in Brazil could set off
a tornado in Texas. This is a problem for long-term weather
forecasters, but Ditto and Sinha reasoned that if they could construct
a circuit that behaved in a chaotic manner, then they might be able to
use this sensitivity to their advantage. On a whim, they began to
sketch out a design.

Deliberately creating chaos rather goes against the grain for

electrical engineers. Though students are often taught how to build
circuits that behave chaotically, this is for one reason only: so that
they will know how to avoid chaotic behaviour in the circuits they
design later in their careers. The challenge is that chaotic signals
can form spontaneously in devices like amplifiers, seeded by nothing
more than background noise. This produces an oscillating current that
can quickly swamp the desired signal. Because of the apparent
randomness of their output, these circuits are sometimes used in
random number generators. Ditto reasoned, however, that beneath the
chaos the output is cycling through a set of predictable voltages, and
by nudging the circuit he ought to be able to stabilise it into any
one of a number of states. This could be used to construct a logic
gate.

Logic gates are the building blocks of computer processors. There are
several types, each one producing a different digital output from a
particular combination of 1s or 0s that it receives at its inputs. A
NOR gate, for example, generates an output of 0 with any input values,
unless both are 0. If Ditto and Sinha could mimic such behaviour by
stabilising the oscillations in a chaotic circuit, it could bring some
unique advantages. Stabilise the chaos in one particular pattern and
they might be able to create the equivalent of a NOR gate. Stabilise
it in a different pattern and they might get the equivalent of a NAND
gate, which outputs a 1 unless both inputs are 1.
In 1998, Ditto and Sinha outlined their theory in a paper called
"Dynamics based computation" (Physical Review Letters, vol 81, p
2156) and started to flesh out the idea. By 2002 they had published
detailed results of computer simulations showing how such a device
might function. They envisioned a chaotic logic gate with two inputs
and one output like a conventional gate, but made up of a chaotic
element they call a "chaogate". When the chaogate receives its input
signals, the internal chaotic circuit begins to oscillate, rapidly
stabilising at a value that depends on the inputs and, crucially, a
control signal.

The control signal has two components. The first is a fixed "bias"
voltage which, along with the gate inputs, directs the circuit's
chaotic oscillations into a particular pattern. The second component
monitors the circuit and triggers an output when the chaotic
oscillations reach the desired threshold voltage (see diagram).
According to the team's calculations, simply changing the settings of
the control signal would allow them to morph a chaogate into any logic
gate they wanted.

By 2005 they had constructed a prototype gate that behaved as they

envisaged (Physics Letters A, vol 339, p 39). It was large,
requiring roughly 1000 transistors - about 100 times as many as a
conventional logic gate - but they showed it could morph from a NOR
gate to a NAND gate in about a nanosecond. "We don't design NAND, NOR
and AND gates," Ditto says, "they are already there." The chaogate
takes the rich pattern of chaotic behaviour and selects the bits that
are required.

Ditto has set up a company called Chaologix to commercialise the

concept and is building prototype circuits using manufacturing
technology similar to that used in conventional chip-making plants. At
the moment, their gates require around 120 transistors - 100 in the
control circuit and 20 in the gate circuit - but the number is
shrinking all the time, Ditto says. The latest design uses just two
transistors for the chaotic circuit with another 20 in the control
circuit.

So where might we expect to find Ditto's morphing logic? Digital

devices such as mobile phones rely on chips known as ASICs
(application specific integrated circuits), which are custom-designed
and built to perform specific functions. Each new handset requires new
ASICs, and every ASIC needs a dedicated fabrication process which
costs millions of dollars to set up. With chaotic logic, one design
could be transformed into a variety of custom chips at a fraction of
the cost. This flexibility is already available thanks to the field
programmable gate array (FPGA), a chip consisting of a set of logic
gates and a network of programmable connections that engineers
manipulate to change the ways the gates are connected. But these
connections consume around 90 per cent of the circuitry on an FPGA
chip. Ditto says that Chaologix chips could be just as flexible, while
leaving far more of their transistors and circuits available for
useful work.

And ASICs are only the start. A single chaotic logic chip should be
able to reinvent itself time after time, and in far more radical ways.
To prove the principle, Ditto has created a chaotic chip designed to
mimic the function of an 8-bit microprocessor. Costing pennies each,
they are used in their millions to control everything from toys and
toasters to washing machines. Ditto's chip does the job using around
5000 transistors, where the normal processors need 15,000. What's
more, it can morph in an instant from an 8-bit to a 16-bit processor.
This sort of adaptability is unprecedented, Ditto claims, and with
chip-makers struggling to pack ever more processing power into a
smaller space, the possibility of making every chip multifunctional is
particularly attractive.

With this in mind, Ditto and his colleagues are stripping down their
chaotic circuits to see just how few transistors they can get away
with. They calculate that they can reduce the 750 million transistors
used in one of the latest graphics processor chips by an order of
magnitude. "We might get away with 75 million transistors," he says.
This is not just an matter of saving space. Powerful graphics chips
consume a large amount of power and throw out heat that has to be
removed. Chaogates could reduce power consumption and perhaps
eliminate the need for fans to keep these chips from overheating.

Chaotic logic gates can each morph to provide a variety of functions,

so damage to any part of a chip containing them need not cause failure
- it could reconfigure itself to bypass the damaged section. This
could be very useful in space. Probes equipped with chaotic logic
could prove significantly more robust, and remain operational when
those that rely on conventional circuitry have failed.

Alongside its processors, every computer needs memory chips, and here
Ditto's chaotic logic also promises radical change. To help achieve
this, Ditto has enlisted Mark Spano from the Caderock division of the
Naval Surface Warfare Center in West Bethesda, Maryland, who is
studying how chaotic states can be used to store and retrieve
information.
Total recall
One of the simplest forms of digital memory is the flip-flop. This
small circuit has two stable states, one to represent a digital 1 and
the other to represent 0, so the flip-flop can store a single bit of
binary data. But storing data such as text takes a lot of bits. With
26 letters in the alphabet, it takes at least five bits of data - but
more usually eight - to represent each letter.

A chaogate is far more flexible, as it has a huge number of stable

states, each one at a different voltage. There are more than enough of
these states to represent every letter of the alphabet, perhaps enough
for every word in the English language. To demonstrate this, Spano has
used chaogates to store the 1452 characters making up Abraham
Lincoln's Gettysburg Address. Using conventional binary gates this
would require about 12,000 bits of memory. Non-linear chaotic bits, or
"nits" as Spano calls them, can represent individual words rather than
letters, and that takes up just 264 nits. "It's a tremendous saving in
storage space," says Spano.

Chaos could also make retrieving information much faster. In

conventional searching tasks - hunting for a file name on your
computer's hard disc, for example - the computer must check each
memory cell in turn to see if its contents match the search criteria.
With nits you can search every memory cell simultaneously, Spano says.
Say you have stored the Gettysburg Address, with each word represented
by a nit in a different voltage state, and you want to find the word
"liberty". With a chaogate memory you simply set the bias on all nits
to the voltage matching "liberty" and interrogate them using a 1
input. Thanks to the way that chaogates operate, every nit will output
a 0, except the cell containing "liberty", which produces a 1.

This type of "parallel" search process is already possible with a form

of conventional memory called content addressable memory. But CAM
requires extra circuitry, making it expensive and power-hungry.
Chaotic memory could be cheaper, since it can store data at higher
densities and retrieve it at least eight times as fast as conventional
memory, Ditto says. More importantly, he adds, these circuits could
morph as required.

"It's exciting research and creates a lot of possibilities," says

engineer Paul Hasler from Georgia Tech. "I think there's a lot more
that hasn't been tapped yet." Luca Gammaitoni, a physicist at the
University of Perugia in Italy, agrees: "the work is certainly sound
and interesting". But he points out that electrical noise in the
memory circuits could blur the voltage state of each nit to the point
where it becomes difficult to distinguish between them. The idea will
be put to the test before long, when Chaologix launches its chaotic
search system, which Ditto says will use these parallel search
capabilities to profile customer spending and browsing habits for a
large online publisher.

Eventually, Ditto suggests, chaotic logic could transform the way

search engines function. These systems catalogue the internet, store
the resulting list of websites in massive databases, and then sort the
contents to create an index. This database must also be continually
updated, and that requires huge resources. Google, for example, has
around 40 large data centres. Chaotic logic could help keep such data
centres down to a manageable size, Ditto says, as well as increasing
search speed. Specialised chaotic search chips could also be built
into every desktop computer.

First the big chip-makers will have to be convinced that chaotic chips
are worth mass-producing. Although Chaologix's chips can be built
using existing fabrication plants, developing the interface capable of
automatically morphing the chips could prove expensive, says Haslar.
Ditto has talked with a number of chip-makers but suspects that they
don't quite know what to make of his idea.

Whether Ditto succeeds in transforming the silicon chip, chaotic logic

could prove itself when conventional computing hits the buffers.
Several exotic alternatives to silicon have been proposed, including
light-based computing. Unfortunately, there are all kinds of hurdles
to building the equivalent of logic gates in these systems, but the
use of chaos may solve many of them, Ditto says. "That may be where
this approach really shines."