Wi-Fi is good for more than just getting your computer online 鈥� it can be a computer in and of itself. By bouncing Wi-Fi waves around a room in a precise and controlled manner, they can be used as an 鈥渁nalogue computer鈥� to do complex calculations.
This unusual application is the brainwave of Philipp del Hougne at the Langevin Institute in France and Geoffroy Lerosey at tech startup Greenerwave. They created a way to use microwaves like the ones that carry Wi-Fi聽to perform calculations as they scatter through the air. 鈥淵ou can do the whole operation in one go, whereas a traditional computer would take a lot of steps,鈥� says del Hougne.
It is a bit like having a machine that adds five to everything 鈥� if you want to know what, say, two plus five is, you create a wave representing two, send it through a medium that modulates in a way corresponding to adding five, and at the end you have a wave representing seven.
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The researchers demonstrated their concept with more a more complicated type of calculation called matrix multiplication, which is used in many physics and engineering applications, particularly in building the artificial neurons used in neural networks.
Their technique is not the first to use waves for calculations, but this sort of computing聽usually involves聽sending the wave through a carefully tailored medium. This experiment takes a different approach, sculpting the wave by bouncing it off of specially-designed panels before sending it through ordinary air. In experiments, the researchers found that the computations were correct more than 96 per cent of the time.
For complicated enough calculations, del Hougne says, this could be faster than regular computers and maybe also more energy-efficient. And depending on the wavelength of the waves, it could be done in a space small enough to fit into a regular data centre rack, where it could help with calculations used in artificial intelligence.
Wave-based computing could also let you turn just about anything into a computer, from your home office to parts of your body. 鈥淵ou can use pretty much any random medium,鈥� says del Hougne. 鈥淚n principle, you could do this with your thumb if you held it still enough.鈥�
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