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Thursday, November 01, 2018
09:00 AM - 10:00 AM
TA-3, 524, Room 105

Seminar

Leveraging collective dynamics to accelerate computation

Forrest Sheldon
UCSD

Recent work on memristor based dynamical systems, known as digital memcomputing machines (DMMs), has shown advantages in the solution of a wide range of hard combinatorial optimization problems. The physical reason behind this power rests on the DMMs collective dynamics in the form of dynamical long-range order (DLRO), which allows the efficient navigation of the problem state space. In this talk I will first review work we have done to assess the capabilities of computing with DMMs on a variety of combinatorial optimization benchmarks. Using DMMs as a guide, I will then propose a phenomenological model which captures the essential features of the dynamics in a simplified context and for a well-known problem: finding the ground state of an Ising spin glass. The model proceeds towards the ground state via a series of transitions which display correlations extending across the entire lattice, clearly supporting DLRO. I will then show that a full implementation of a DMM exhibits superior scaling compared to other methods when tested on the same problem class. These results further reinforce the advantages of computational approaches based on collective dynamics.

Host: Francesco Caravelli