alt.hn

4/15/2026 at 11:42:06 PM

The Universal Constraint Engine: Neuromorphic Computing Without Neural Networks

 https://zenodo.org/records/19600206

by skinney_uce

4/16/2026 at 2:24:41 AM

Why do I get the overwhelming feeling that the author is not a technical person and they had a LLM write this based on some handwavey ideas? There's virtually no _there_ there.

"...demonstrates its capabilities through worked examples" - The hell it does, your "examples" are three lines long. If you're going to compare it with LLMs, then have it do something LLM-ish. Or hell, the MNIST number recognition task would be better than the "hey look i modeled a flip-flop in my funny language" example.

Am I being harsh? Yes, I am. The author is claiming that they have a system that can automatically generate code for "quantum" and "spintronic" computers, yet offers zero proof of that.

by aappleby

4/16/2026 at 3:10:10 AM

It's ok to be harsh — I was vague, and I know it. Here's why: I remember the story about DOS. Tim Paterson built it, showed too much, and someone else built an empire on it for $50K. I have working constraint rules that produce real circuit behaviors. The paper shows what comes out, not how it works, and that's deliberate. The patent is provisional. I'm not going to hand over implementation details on a forum so someone with more resources can run with it. You'd do the same thing.

by skinney_uce

4/16/2026 at 2:34:27 AM

This is indeed a content-free "paper".

by colechristensen

4/16/2026 at 3:38:00 AM

Interesting. Reminds me of William Bricken’s work on boundary logic.

by mbowring

4/16/2026 at 2:14:47 PM

Bricken's boundary logic is a solid reference point. Both approaches throw out the standard computational primitives and let behavior come from structure instead of instructions.

The difference is what you're constraining. Bricken works with containment and distinction. UCE works with conserved quantities — closer to physics than logic. You define constraints over those quantities, and computational behaviors like memory, oscillation, and logic gating fall out of satisfying them simultaneously.

The other big difference is the output. UCE doesn't produce a proof or a reduction — it produces a state-transition graph that compiles directly to hardware. Same rules, different substrates. That's what the Embodiment Mapper layer does.

by skinney_uce

4/16/2026 at 1:08:41 AM

this seems like a nice rule compiler, but what makes it neuromorphic?

by convolvatron

4/16/2026 at 3:06:55 AM

The behaviors that emerge — hysteresis, oscillation, bistable memory — are the same computational primitives you see in biological neural circuits, but they come from constraint satisfaction over conserved quantities instead of simulating neurons. The architecture doesn't model neurons at all. It produces the same outputs through a different mechanism. Whether that still counts as "neuromorphic" is debatable — I use the term because the output behaviors map directly to the same hardware substrates (Loihi, SpiNNaker, etc).

by skinney_uce

4/16/2026 at 5:11:02 AM

Can you recommend some good books/papers/articles/videos to better understand Neuromorphic Computing and its Applications?

by rramadass

4/16/2026 at 2:30:08 PM

Carver Mead's "Analog VLSI and Neural Systems" for where neuromorphic computing started. Intel's Loihi papers (Mike Davies et al.) for where it is now. Our paper takes a different path — constraints instead of neurons.

by skinney_uce

4/17/2026 at 3:28:13 AM

Thank You. I see those (and more) at the wikipedia entry for NC.

Any books you can recommend? I see a bunch on Amazon but not sure which are the good technical ones. Something with more information about the various hardware approaches (eg. non-ISA/hybrid/etc.) would be welcome.

by rramadass

4/19/2026 at 11:53:15 PM

Event-Based Neuromorphic Systems" (Liu, Delbrück, Indiveri, Whatley, Douglas — Wiley 2014). For current silicon, read the Loihi 2, TrueNorth, and SpiNNaker 2 primary papers directly — books can't keep up with where the hardware is actually moving.

by skinney_uce

4/20/2026 at 3:16:13 PM

Thank You.

by rramadass

4/15/2026 at 11:43:06 PM

[dead]

by skinney_uce