Jan 23, 2018; Talk
"Missing Foundations for Complexity and Intelligence", Prof. Leon Chua (Berkeley)
The electrical engineer Prof. Leon Chua, University of California, Berkeley, lectures on the age-old enigma of life at the TU Dresden
How can new structures emerge spontaneously? How can disorder and chaos turn into a stable and efficient system? How can intelligence and life itself be explained? – Luminaries such as Boltzmann, Schrodinger, Turing, Prigogine, etc. have searched in vain for a missing principle of complexity that could answer these questions. Prof. Chua’s talk presents an engineering breakthrough, dubbed local activity, to this age-old enigma.
Local activity is the long-sought holy grail of complexity, the elan vital of life!
In high-tech parlance, the principle of local activity asserts that no computers, smart phones, brain-like machines, etc., can be built without using locally-active building blocks. A simple sophomore-level algorithm is available for testing whether a device is locally active, as well as for massaging the device`s parameters into a sweet spot of local activity.
Local activity is a necessary but not sufficient condition for complexity. To build a brain-like machine, and ultimately to create life itself, an enabling nano device, dubbed the memristor, must be commissioned. Together, local activity, and the memristor, are sufficient to build a universal Turing machine, including a super-intelligent cellular automata with the endearing moniker 137.
Prof. Chua gives his talk "Missing Foundations for Complexity and Intelligence" on January 23, 2018 at 4:40 p.m. in the Hörsaalzentrum of the TU Dresden (Bergstr. 64), lecture hall 3. The lecture is in English. All interested are cordially invited to the lecture.
Information about Prof. Chua:
Leon O. Chua is Professor Emeritus at the Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science at the University of California, Berkeley. He is an internationally well-known pioneer in nonlinear circuits, Cellular Neural Networks and chaos. His work in these areas has been recognized internationally through 7 major awards, including the IEEE Gustav Kirchhoff Award, 7 USA patents, and 16 honorary doctorates. He is also a recipient of the top 15 cited authors in Engineering Award. Leon Chua was elected a foreign member of the European Academy of Sciences (Academia Europea). He is a foreign member of the Hungarian Academy of Science and John Simon Guggenheim fellow. He has published more than 500 papers in reviewed scientific journals and 8 books. Leon Chua was awarded a TUM affiliated Distinguished Professor at the Technische Universität München in 2011.