New analog compiler could help enable simulation of whole organs and even organisms.
A transistor, conceived of in digital terms, has two states: on and off, which can represent the 1s and 0s of binary arithmetic.
But in analog terms, the transistor has an infinite number of states, which could, in principle, represent an infinite range of mathematical values. Digital computing, for all its advantages, leaves most of transistors’ informational capacity on the table.
In recent years, analog computers have proven to be much more efficient at simulating biological systems than digital computers. But existing analog computers have to be programmed by hand, a complex process that would be prohibitively time consuming for large-scale simulations.
Last week, at the Association for Computing Machinery’s conference on Programming Language Design and Implementation, researchers at MIT’s Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory and Dartmouth College presented a new compiler for analog computers, a program that translates between high-level instructions written in a language intelligible to humans and the low-level specifications of circuit connections in an analog computer.
The work could help pave the way to highly efficient, highly accurate analog simulations of entire organs, if not organisms.