21-Dec-2020 | Market Research Store
The Hokkaido University and Amoeba Energy research team from Japan took inspiration from the single-celled amoeba to develop a computer analog that will help rapidly hunt down valid solution by overcoming the traveling salesman problem. The researchers believe that the new invention could be applicable in planning and scheduling in logistics and automation. It has been seen that the digital computers including supercomputers are unable to solve the intricate problems in small time as the candidate required to evaluate increases exponentially with the problem size and this is known as combinatorial explosion. However, the newly created computers named Ising machines comprise of quantum annealers and these machines are known to use complicated preprocessing strategies to transform tasks into usable form. However, the latest computer possesses a risk of displaying illegal solutions that do not abide by the requests and constraints.
The electronic amoeba which is nothing but an analog computer is likely the most preferred option that can help overcome the travelling salesman problem (TSP) that is finding the shortest route in a map and also returning to the start point. The single-celled organism’s multi-functionality encouraged the scientists to prepare analog circuit. The new invention provides solution under the electronic environment with resistance values present at intersections of crossbars symbolizing constraints and requests of the TSP. With the help of crossbars, the layouts of cities can be changed by upgrading the resistance values using less intricate pre-processing.
The researcher Kenta Saito was successful in designing the circuit on a breadboard and finding the shortest route for the 4-city TSP. For larger-sized problems, the circuit stimulator found a high-quality legal solution using shorter route length than the average length with the random sampling. It was found that as the number of cities increased the time required to find a high-quality legal solution also linearly increased. The search time and representative TSP algorithm 2-opt’s comparison proved advantageous for the electronic amoeba as the analog circuit reproduced unique and efficient optimized solutions. The amoeba-inspired computers is believed to enhance the possibilities of tackling real-world problems by changing inputs, constraints, and requests or integrating them as power-saving microchips.
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