Unconventional Information Processing Systems , Novel Hardware : A Tour d ’ Horizon

This report provides a wide-angle survey on computational paradigms which have a possible bearing on the development of unconventional computational substrates and hardware devices. Such unconvential substrates and devices have some properties that alienate them from the classical Turing model of computation. Among other challenging characteristics, they are non-digital, unclocked, low-precision, exhibit static and dynamic parameter drift, and may have limited lifetime. Such properties are shared with biological computing systems – brains, but not only brains – , so this survey includes ideas and insights from neuroscience and the natural computing field.