Link of the day: A Neural Network in a Piece of Glass
Usually, we conceptualize neural nets as a piece of software running on a computer. A group of researchers now used a block of glass as a neural network. You don’t need any electricity or anything else to power it. Simple shine a number from one to ten on it and the glass will output the correct number with 80% accuracy. The researchers are currently working on improving the accuracy. The most interesting thing about it is that this is a first step into doing actual computations with light. This could, at least in theory, become a big deal as all computations happen practically instantaneously. Here is the paper.