近日，清华大学施路平团队发布世界首款异构融合类脑计算芯片“天机芯”（Tianjic），这是世界上第一个既可支持脉冲神经网络又可支持人工神经网路的人工智能芯片。目前，该成果已在《自然》杂志作为封面文章发表，实现了中国在芯片和人工智能两大领域《自然》论文零的突破。（人民日报）
And Now, a Bicycle Built for None
The New York Times
It’s not the first self-driving bike. But equipped with an A.I. chip, it may be the nearest to thinking for itself.
As corporate giants like Ford, G.M. and Waymo struggle to get their self-driving cars on the road, a team of researchers in China is rethinking autonomous transportation using a souped-up bicycle.
表示“（车辆或机器）经过增强的”，英文解释为“A souped-up vehicle or machine has been made more powerful or faster by having changes made to it.”如：a souped-up MiniChevy 增强型迷你雪佛兰。
This bike can roll over a bump on its own, staying perfectly upright. When the man walking just behind it says “left,” it turns left, angling back in the direction it came.
作名词，表示“（路面）隆起部分”，英文解释为“A bump on a road is a raised, uneven part.”举个🌰：
The truck hit a bump and bounced.
卡车开到了路面上一块隆起的地方，颠簸起来。
It also has eyes: It can follow someone jogging several yards ahead, turning each time the person turns. And if it encounters an obstacle, it can swerve to the side, keeping its balance and continuing its pursuit.
表示“突然改变方向，急转弯”，英文解释为“to change direction, especially suddenly”举个🌰：
The bus driver swerved to avoid hitting a cyclist.
为了不撞上骑自行车的人，这辆公共汽车只好急转弯。
It is not the first-ever autonomous bicycle (Cornell University has a project underway) or, probably, the future of transportation, although it could find a niche in a future world swarming with package-delivery vehicles, drones and robots. (There are even weirder ideas out there.) Nonetheless, the Chinese researchers who built the bike believe it demonstrates the future of computer hardware. It navigates the world with help from what is called a neuromorphic chip, modeled after the human brain.
表示“（产品或服务的）商机；市场定位”，英文解释为“an opportunity to sell a product or service to a particular group of people who have similar needs, interests etc”举个🌰：
He spotted a niche in the market.
他发现了市场中的一个商机。
Neuromorphic engineering, also known as neuromorphic computing, is a concept developed by Carver Mead, in the late 1980s, describing the use of very-large-scale integration (VLSI) systems containing electronic analog circuits to mimic neuro-biological architectures present in the nervous system.
In a paper published on Wednesday in Nature, the researchers described how such a chip could help machines respond to voice commands, recognize the surrounding world, avoid obstacles and maintain balance. The researchers also provided a video showing these skills at work on a motorized bicycle.The short video did not show the limitations of the bicycle (which presumably tips over occasionally), and even the researchers who built the bike admitted in an email to The Times that the skills on display could be duplicated with existing computer hardware. But in handling all these skills with a neuromorphic processor, the project highlighted the wider effort to achieve new levels of artificial intelligence with novel kinds of chips.
表示“翻倒”，英文解释为“If you tip something over or if it tips over, it falls over or turns over.”举个🌰：
He tipped the table over in front of him.
他打翻了他前面的那张桌子。
This effort spans myriad start-up companies and academic labs, as well as big-name tech companies like Google, Intel and IBM. And as the Nature paper demonstrates, the movement is gaining significant momentum in China, which has invested heavily in the idea of an “A.I. chip.”
表示“大量的；各种各样的”，英文解释为“Myriad means having a large number or great variety.”举个🌰：
The magazine has been celebrating pop in all its myriad forms.
该杂志一直在赞美各种形式的流行音乐。
表示“大名鼎鼎的”，英文解释为“a person who is famous in a certain sphere.”
The hope is that such chips will eventually allow machines to navigate the world with an autonomy not possible today. Existing robots can learn to open a door or toss a Ping-Pong ball into a plastic bin, but the training takes hours to days of trial and error. Even then, the skills are viable only in very particular situations. With help from neuromorphic chips and other new processors, machines could learn more complex tasks more efficiently, and be more adaptable in executing them.
表示“扔，掷，抛”，英文解释为“to throw something, especially something light, with a quick gentle movement of your hand”举个🌰：
She crumpled the letter and tossed it into the fire.
她把信揉成一团，扔进了火里。
表示“反复试验，试错法”，英文解释为“a way of achieving an aim or solving a problem by trying a number of different methods and learning from the mistakes that you make”举个🌰：
There's no instant way of finding a cure - it's just a process of trial and error.
找到治疗方案不可能一蹴而就——这只能是一个反复试验的过程。
“That is where we see the big promise,” said Mike Davies, who oversees Intel’s efforts to build neuromorphic chips.Over the past decade, the development of artificial intelligence has accelerated thanks to what are called neural networks: complex mathematical systems that can learn tasks by analyzing vast amounts of data. By metabolizing thousands of cat photos, for instance, a neural network can learn to recognize a cat.This is the technology that recognizes faces in the photos you post to Facebook, identifies the commands you bark into your smartphone and translates between languages on internet services like Microsoft Skype. It is also hastening the advance of autonomous robots, including self-driving cars. But it faces significant limitations.
表示“大声嚷，吼叫”，英文解释为“to say something quickly in a loud voice”举个🌰：
Don’t just stand there, give me a hand,’ she barked at the shop assistant.
“别光站在那里，帮我一把。”她对那店员吼道。
A neural network doesn’t really learn on the fly. Engineers train a neural network for a particular task before sending it out into the real world, and it can’t learn without enormous numbers of examples. OpenAI, a San Francisco artificial intelligence lab, recently built a system that could beat the world’s best players at a complex video game called Dota 2. But the system first spent months playing the game against itself, burning through millions of dollars in computing power.Researchers aim to build systems that can learn skills in a manner similar to the way people do. And that could require new kinds of computer hardware. Dozens of companies and academic labs are now developing chips specifically for training and operating A.I. systems. The most ambitious projects are the neuromorphic processors, including the Tianjic chip under development at Tsinghua University in China.Such chips are designed to imitate the network of neurons in the brain, not unlike a neural network but with even greater fidelity, at least in theory.
表示“准确度；精确性”，英文解释为“the degree to which the detail and quality of an original, such as a picture, sound, or story, is copied exactly”举个🌰：
The best ink-jet printers can reproduce photographs with amazing fidelity.
最好的喷墨打印机输出的照片效果会非常逼真。
Neuromorphic chips typically include hundreds of thousands of faux neurons, and rather than just processing 1s and 0s, these neurons operate by trading tiny bursts of electrical signals, “firing” or “spiking” only when input signals reach critical thresholds, as biological neurons do.
表示“假的；伪造的；人工的”，英文解释为“not real, but made to look or seem real”，如：faux fur 人造毛，a faux-brick wall 假砖墙。
“This is about trying to bridge and unify computer science and neuroscience,” said Gordon Wilson, the chief executive of Rain Neuromorphics, a start-up company that is developing a neuromorphic chip.Neuromorphic chips are by no means a recreation of the brain. In so many respects, the workings of the brain remain a mystery. But the hope for such chips is that, by operating a bit more like the brain, they can help A.I. systems learn skills and execute tasks more efficiently.Because each faux neuron fires only on demand rather than continuously, neuromorphic chips consume less energy than traditional processors. And because they are designed to process information in short bursts, some researchers believe they could lead to systems that learn on the fly, from much smaller amounts of data.In the video, the bicycle is not learning; it is merely executing software that had been trained to handle specific tasks, including recognizing spoken words and avoiding obstacles. But it is executing the software in an efficient way, which is important to vehicles that run on battery power. Researchers believe they can eventually merge the training process and the in-the-moment execution, so that a bicycle could learn as it goes, from just a few moments of experience.The rub is that building the right hardware may require at least several more years of research. “We are still in the trial and error stage,” said Georgios Dimou, who previously worked on Intel’s neuromorphic project.
表示“问题，困难，障碍”，英文解释为“the particular problem that makes a situation difficult or impossible”举个🌰：
You can't get a job unless you have experience, but there's the rub, you can't get experience unless you have a job.
没有工作经验你就没法找到一份工作，但问题是，没有工作又没法获得经验。
The Chinese researchers believe that time will bring far more than just autonomous bicycles. Their paper paints the Tianjic chip as a step toward “artificial general intelligence,” a machine that can do anything you and your brain can do. But that is merely the promise du jour. Maybe start with helping it learn to ride a bike.
表示“今日特色的；当天供应的”，英文解释为“(of food in a restaurant) the particular type available today”。
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