Animal behavior often involves a temporally ordered sequence of actions learned from experience. Here we describe simulations of interconnected networks of spiking neurons that learn to generate patterns of activity in correct temporal order. The simulation consists of large-scale networks of thousands of excitatory and inhibitory neurons that exhibit short-term synaptic plasticity and spike-ti...

An asynchronous PDM (Pulse-Density-Modulating) digital neural network system has been developed in our laboratory. It consists of one thousand neurons that are physically interconnected via one million 7-bit synapses. It can solve one thousand simultaneous nonlinear first-order differential equations in a fully parallel and continuous fashion. The performance of this system was measured by a wi...

What kinds of electoral systems can help democracy survive in countries split by deep cleavages of race, religion, language, or ethnicity? As is well-known, politicians in such “divided societies” often have strong incentives to “play the ethnic card” at election time, using communal appeals to mobilize voters. “Outbidding”—increasingly extreme rhetoric and demands—can offer rewards greater tha...

A winner-take-all (WTA) single-electron neuron is developed for the first time. This new single-electron circuit is proposed in order to implement a WTA neural network with lateral inhibition architecture. An expression for the neuron’s activation function is presented. Furthermore, a dot pattern recognition task is successfully performed by the implemented network considering effects such as o...

The Communications website, http://cacm.acm.org, features more than a dozen bloggers in the BLOG@CACM community. In each issue of , we'll publish selected posts or excerpts. twitter Follow us on Twitter at http://twitter.com/blogCACM http://cacm.acm.org/blogs/blog-cacm Mark Guzdial assesses outlook for students taking computer science classes high school level.