Quite an interesting article today in phys.org:
http://phys.org/news/2013-02-self-repairing.htmlExtract from the PDF:
« In the past century, continuous advancements in the fields
of electronics and computer science have made modern
computers extremely powerful computing machines. The vast
majority of their architectures are loyal to the conventional von
Neumann design which has now reached well over half a
century in age. Unfortunately, nature is organized in an
inherently different manner, without any sense of program or
data memory and certainly without a sequential state machine
traversing through well-defined states. In order to more
efficiently model natural systems, the serial, deterministic and
centralized design of conventional computers should be
replaced with a parallel, stochastic and distributed architecture. »
