Probability processing explained

08.17.2010 // Scientific Computing // abhishektiwari // 4 Comments

According to a press release from MIT spin-out Lyric Semiconductor, a new processor which uses probability values between 0 and 1 instead of digital 1s and 0s will be available in market in next 12 months.

Data is represented as bits (1s and 0s). Boolean logic gates perform operations on these bits. Lyric has invented a new kind of logic gate circuit that uses transistors as dimmer switches instead of as on/off switches. These circuits can accept inputs and calculate outputs that are between 0 and 1, directly representing probabilities – levels of certainty.

A digital processor steps through these operations serially in order to perform a function. In order to improve efficiency even further, Lyric’s processors are designed to perform many probability computations in parallel.

Lyric’s approach can accelerate search, fraud detection, spam filtering, financial modeling, genome sequence analysis, and many other important present and future applications that involve simultaneously considering many possible alternatives and deciding on the best fit – the best guess for the answer.