A new kind of computer science

I don't pretend to understand this, but when someone announces they have found, "the fourth fundamental circuit element, along with the resistor, capacitor and inductor," I take notice (ref (see, it's so easy!)). It seems odd to me that this bit of electrical engineering, known as the memristor, was "found" and not created-- the researchers write, "Here we show, using a simple analytical example, that memristance arises naturally in nanoscale systems in which solid-state electronic and ionic transport are coupled under an external bias voltage." Uh, OK.

Anyway the NYT says, "Potentially even more tantalizing is the ability of the memristors to store and retrieve a vast array of intermediate values, not just the binary 1s and 0s conventional chips use. This allows them to function like biological synapses and makes them ideal for many artificial intelligence applications ranging from machine vision to understanding speech."