Memristors made easy

HP invented the memristors (some would even say "discovered") several years ago and managed to create memristors on a dye after that so that memristors chips could be produced.
Now they have announced the release in 2015 of an Operating Systems that will allow developers to create applications based on memristors, making programming them easier.
Memristors are a sort  of transistors that can remember what took place (hence the name memory-transistor shrunk into a single word). In a way they are similar to neurones, whose activity depend both on the information (stimuli) received at a given instant and on what happened before.  Because of this neutrons can perform interesting computation that are very complex to be implemented using transistors. Not so if one were to use memristors for computation. 
Of course as neurones are not good for all kinds of computations, so memristors are not good for all kinds of computations, in a word, they are not going to replace transistors.
If you are looking for a precise result, like how much is it 2+2, you’d expect your computation device to come up with 4 every single time. On the other hand if you are asking a brain for the 4th time in a row how much is 2+2 you are likely to get something like "Are you bloody deaf?"
However, at least for the time being, HP goal is not to create a computer that mimics a brain, rather to have a computer that leverages the memristors characteristics to better process huge amounts of data. They have launched a program called "The Machine".
This, claims HP, will be a radically new computation system, using electrons for processing, photons for communications and ions for storage. Memristors are instrumental in fusing memory with storage and in bringing processing closed to data thus achieving faster data processing. You can get an overview in the video clip.
The Operating Systems 2015 release announcement is a step in this direction.

About Roberto Saracco

Roberto Saracco fell in love with technology and its implications long time ago. His background is in math and computer science. Until April 2017 he led the EIT Digital Italian Node and then was head of the Industrial Doctoral School of EIT Digital up to September 2018. Previously, up to December 2011 he was the Director of the Telecom Italia Future Centre in Venice, looking at the interplay of technology evolution, economics and society. At the turn of the century he led a World Bank-Infodev project to stimulate entrepreneurship in Latin America. He is a senior member of IEEE where he leads the New Initiative Committee and co-chairs the Digital Reality Initiative. He is a member of the IEEE in 2050 Ad Hoc Committee. He teaches a Master course on Technology Forecasting and Market impact at the University of Trento. He has published over 100 papers in journals and magazines and 14 books.