Who knew gambling could boost battery life?
Can you ustnnderad tihs stnecnee? If so, youve just demonstrated your ability to take the important information in a communication (in this case, the first and last letters of each word), and essentially fill in the missing information. Your brains ability to fill in the blanks extends to sounds and pictures, too, and a new computer chip developed by Rice computer scientist Krishna Palem is capitalizing on this cerebral skill. Audio and video feeds begin with mathematical computations, and Palems new chip saves energy by only doing the important calculations the ones that produce sounds and images your brain must see in order to figure out the rest of the information on its own. To accomplish this, the chip reduces power to some of the logic circuits that compute the least important figures like the 1 in 84,351 and takes a risk that some of this less significant data may be calculated wrong. That gamble could pay off significantly when it comes to batteries for audio and video devices
