Cornell's world-first 'microwave brain' computes differently

https://newatlas.com/computers/cornell-microwave-brain/

by wjSgoWPm5bWAhXB • 11 months ago

82 18 11 months ago

newatlas.com

Eddy_Viscosity2• 11 months ago

Long live analog!

OutOfHere• 11 months ago

Link is not loading, probably due to DNS ad-blocking being blocked. Can someone save it to archive?

Here is an alt link: https://news.cornell.edu/stories/2025/08/researchers-build-f...

gcoguiec• 11 months ago

Alternative link from Cornell's website: https://news.cornell.edu/stories/2025/08/researchers-build-f...

bjornsing2• 11 months ago

Seems to be the press release for this article: https://www.nature.com/articles/s41928-025-01422-1

Anyone know where I can read it?

hnuser123456• 11 months ago

You can read it from that link if you're accessing from an institution subscribed to Nature or have Nature+.

bjornsing2• 11 months ago

I asked Claude to dream it up instead. It was good.

griffzhowl• 11 months ago

Got the link from google scholar:

[PDF] https://www.researchsquare.com/article/rs-5494383/latest.pdf

nis0s• 11 months ago

It seems it will still use some digital process to encode and decode whatever is transmitted or received, I could be misreading it.

beardyw• 11 months ago

I have always thought that digital killed analogue prematurely and unnecessarily. I hope this works out.

iaw• 11 months ago

The potential of fully miniature vacuum tubes was never realized

ninalanyon2• 11 months ago

Surely mechanical clocks are digital in the sense that time is quantized into ticks by the escapement. The various gears do not rotate continuously.

Legend2440• 11 months ago

“Discrete” does not mean “digital”.

Digital logic is the system of gates and switches that we use as an abstraction layer over analog circuits. AND, OR, XOR, etc.

You certainly could build logic gates out of gears, and this would be a digital mechanical computer. But it’s not often done.

sherburt3• 11 months ago

I thought digital meant you use your fingers. I use my fingers a lot with my computer

ninalanyon2• 11 months ago

In common speech discrete and digital are pretty much synonyms. Also if we're going to be picky what you described is Boolean logic not digital.

shakna• 11 months ago

Don't you just love how marketing has to slap a "AI" paragraph in there?

The bigger deal is 200mW for 30Ghz. Which incidentally... Is probably never going to be nice for modern AI.

gwbas1c• 11 months ago

One example of an analog computer is a mechanical clock. It calculates that passage of time by means of springs, gears and an escapement that models the real world. Many other examples include slide rules (yes, I'm that old), speedometers, spring or liquid thermometers, and more.

What we call "computer" today is really a "general-purpose computer."

Although, personally I think it's a stretch of semantics to call a mechanical clock a "computer."

miladyincontrol• 11 months ago

Similar sentiments to some of my older camera lenses that call their depth of field scale a computer. Doubly so when they were later cost-reduced out and replaced with basic, static markings rather than a mechanism that expanded/contracted depending on your aperture

eggy• 11 months ago

When I started to really get into robotics, mechanics, and automation back in the late 80s and early 90s, the fork in the road of Rodney Brooke's subsumption architecture, but still digital, approach versus Mark Tilden's BEAM analog approach really had me trying both.

CPGs (Central Pattern Generators) were often implemented using simple RC (resistor-capacitor) circuits within his "nervous net" (NvNet) architectures. The RC circuits generated rhythmic patterns that drove the robots' motor behaviors, allowing gaits to emerge naturally from the interaction of these analog components with the environment and the robot's mechanical structure. This approach enabled adaptive, robust locomotion without requiring complex digital control systems.

His 6-legged robots could lose a leg, and the system would take feedback from the stuck or missing leg, and learn to walk with 5 or 4 legs. Amazing stuff.

Cornell's world-first 'microwave brain' computes differently

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