4 strange new ways to compute [News]

With Moore's Law slowing down, engineers have been taking a hard look at what will keep computing going when the law is no more. Certainly, artificial intelligence will play a role. So might quantum computing. But there are stranger things in the computing universe, and some of them got an airing at the IEEE International Conference on Rebooting Computing, in November. There were cool variations on classics such as reversible computing and neuromorphic chips. Less-familiar concepts got their time in the sun, too, such as photonics chips that accelerate artificial intelligence, nanomechanical comb-shaped logic, and a "hyperdimensional" speech recognition system. What follows includes a taste of both the strange and the potentially powerful.