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Comment by ntownsend | Hacker News Reader

I think I missed something. What is the mechanism that causes the slime/memristor to keep changing states after the external stimulus is removed? I thought the memristor just remembers a voltage. After you remove the external voltage then wouldn't the voltage across the memristor just remember the state it was in when the last external voltage was applied? Likewise for the slime and air.

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The research paper that the newscientist article is referring to ( http://arxiv.org/pdf/0810.4179v2 ) points to some resonance behavior of memristors' "LC contour". I don't understand memristors very well, but it seems that the only connection between memristors and the amoeba's "predictive" behavior is resonance, if there is a connection at all.

While memristors are cool and may in fact help us understand / mimic the learning ability of animals, the amoeba's ability to "predict" external forces is a weak, weak link.

The memristor doesn't keep changing states. Where did you see that?

More technical: http://arstechnica.com/hardware/news/2009/01/logic-circuits-...

Ah. I misread the NewScientist article. It wasn't clear to me that in the experiment to mimic the slime they, in fact, modeled the slime with a circuit that _included_ a memristor and not with just a memristor. The paper the article cites also made things much clearer: http://fr.arxiv.org/abs/0810.4179

FWIW it remembers the time integral of current, not voltage.

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