alt Hacker NewsIt’s not clear to me how this would ever be practical since it seems dependent on n^2 scaling.
You’ve got to wonder when you have an image generation demo why would you possibly have 64 x 64 pixel output as your demo?
If I’m understanding this properly to generate a 4K image, you need like 5 trillion point to point connections on the chip. Even if power use from the oscillators is zero that’s going to be an issue.
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What they are trying to achieve is to demonstrate that the coupling approach works in a simulated physics environment (O(n^2) as you point out) so that they can then build CMOS circuits that create actual oscillators and then let the laws of physics do the computation. This is a very bold vision!
The oscillating elements don't map directly to pixels. Conventional models also have n^2 parameters.
Think of the models making progress on CIFAR-10, ImageNet, CelebA, etc. 15 years ago. They had issues too and weren't just scaled-up as is to the architectures we have today.
Yes I too am perplexed. I'm into audio synthesis so I feel I have somewhat better-than-average knowledge of oscillators, from the component or elementary mathematical level (depending on whether they're analog or digital) to complex interactions for fun and profit (frequency, phase, ring modulation).
These are cool results but I was disappointed not to find any discussion of where oscillator array technology stands today what the manufacturing challenges/opportunities might be. It seems like it would be prohibitively expensive for anything beyond minimal networks of a few hundred nodes that could be used in sensors. Even if you have perfectly consistent oscillators that synchronize to each other within very fine tolerances, wiring them up to each other is still a massive headache.