By THOMAS CURWEN • Los Angeles Times
Jim Gimzewski grabs a silicon wafer with a pair of tweezers and raises it to the light, thinking about Jackson Pollock, snowflakes and Tibetan mandalas.
No bigger than a quarter, the wafer looks like a small circuit board, which under a microscope is a tangle of wires randomly crisscrossed and interwoven like hairs in a tiny dust ball.
He places it inside a box the size of a mini-fridge. He closes the lid, and one of his graduate students, Henry Sillin, begins to run electricity into the box. The dust ball, messy and anarchic as it is, has come to life. Gimzewski is one step closer toward what he calls his final frontier: Building a machine that can think.
His tousled hair, Scottish brogue and clandestine pack of Marlboros would give an impression of a hip madness to the claim — if the science weren't working so well. "We should have walked away," Sillin says, "but it never failed enough for us to give up."
'Landscape you can't imagine'
Gimzewski, a professor of chemistry at UCLA with more than 30 years working in the field of nanotechnology, believes that the tangled design of the chip is the reason for its resilience. The synapses of the brain are, after all, similarly organic and just as untidy.
Colleagues have been skeptical. Yet Gimzewski has faith in the nature of eccentric invention. "We're operating somewhere between chaos and order, somewhere on the edge of chaos," he says.
Conventional computers are ideal for making precise calculations, he says, but what about computing in less predictable environments? He speculates about the chip's potential for predicting the patterns of a forest fire or the gyrations in the stock market, even for operating a driverless car.