Life is probabilistic — why should all our computers be deterministic? Computing with p-bits: Ising Solvers and Beyond

Many problems in life are probabilistic; even deterministic problems are often solved using probabilistic algorithms. Anytime conventional computers are used to process uncertain data or to implement algorithms that leverage randomness there is a mismatch between software and hardware that can be avoided using a probabilistic processor built from probabilistic (p-)bits. In this paper, we present the general applications space for computing with p-bits and show results for learning, image segmentation, Bayesian networks and optimization run on a probabilistic (p-)computer.