ABSTRACT
Brain-inspired computing is an invention by the author and his colleague, Jon Borresen. We applied for our first patent in 2010, which was granted in 2012, and a second patent was granted in 2015. The idea is simple to describe, and the author has been delivering inspirational talks on the subject to local school children aged 11–18 since 2012, as part of Schools Liaison, Speakers for Schools and Widening Participation. The chapter is all about networks of coupled oscillators. The chapter starts with a description of the complicated Hodgkin-Huxley model of a biological neuron and introduces a simplified version known as the Fitzhugh-Nagumo (FN) model. In the next section, using the FN model, the binary oscillator half-adder is described. The half-adder is the basic component of all conventional logic computers. Next, an oscillatory set-reset flip-flop is described, which is used to store memory in computers and has many other applications. The chapter ends with a description of the potential applications of the invention and the progress of building commercial devices to-date. The reader should note that brain-inspired computing, using brain dynamics to build conventional computers, is the opposite of artificial intelligence (AI)—using conventional computers to simulate brain dynamics; however, understanding how biological neurons work is fundamentally important in AI.
