Fabien Alibart

1 Introduction Silicon-based digital computing technologies have achieved tremendous levels of sophistication and perfection over a relatively short period of time in the realm of digital information processing. Yet, digital computing is only a small corner of the much larger field of general computing.

All articles published by MDPI are made immediately available worldwide under an open access license. No special permission is required to reuse all or part of the article published by MDPI, including figures and tables. For articles published under an open access Creative Common CC BY license, any part of the article may be reused without permission provided that the original article is clearly cited. For more information, please refer to https://www.mdpi.com/openaccess.

1. Introduction It has been known since the pioneering of computer architecture by John von Neumann that brains are far more effective and efficient in processing sensory information than digital computers, owing to the massively parallel distributed organization of neural circuits in the brain that tightly couple synaptic memory and computing at a fine grain scale (von Neumann, 1958).