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Tomonobu Nakayama, MANA Deputy Director And His International Collaborators Suggested “The nature of intelligence relies on the edge of chaos”

2 Jul, 2021

The nature of intelligence relies on the edge of chaos
– Expectations for new developments in artificial intelligence development –


Tomonobu Nakayama, MANA Deputy Director, and his international collaborators (Joel Hochstetter and Prof. Zdenka Kuncic from University of Sydney & MANA) have discovered that an artificial network of nanowires can be tuned to respond in a brain-like way when electrically stimulated.

They found that by keeping the network of nanowires in a brain-like state “at the edge of chaos”, it performed tasks at an optimal level. This, they say, suggests the underlying nature of neural intelligence is physical, and their discovery opens an exciting avenue for the development of artificial intelligence.

The study is published online in Nature Communications on June 29, 2021.

Figure : image of neural network (left) and optical image of nanowire network (right).

Paper details


Title : "Avalanches and edge-of-chaos learning in neuromorphic nanowire networks"
Authors : Joel Hochstetter, Ruomin Zhu, Alon Loeffler, Adrian Diaz-Alvarez, Tomonobu Nakayama, and Zdenka Kuncic
Journal : Nature Communications,12, Article number: 4008 (2021) (Online: June 29, 2021)
DOI: 10.1038/s41467-021-24260-z

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Research Center for Materials Nanoarchitectonics (MANA)

National Institute for Materials Science
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Phone: +81-29-860-4710
E-mail: mana-pr[AT]ml.nims.go.jp
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