In 1971, American electrical engineer and computer scientist Leon Chua reasoned that there must exist a fourth fundamental element of computing. There’s the resistor, capacitor, and inductor, but Chua believed there also existed a “memristor”— a portmanteau of “memory” and “resistor” that described a simple, non-volatile memory component that could store information even when turned off.

This sounds like a simple function, but it provides the technological foundation of neuromorphic (a.k.a. brain-like) computing—an effective memristor would essentially act as an artificial synapse in an AI neural net, as it can achieve both data storage and computation at the same time (which is something our brain does). Since researchers “discovered” memristors back in 2008, scientists and engineers around the world have been slowly improving their capabilities in the hopes of bringing about computers that are as efficient and powerful as human brains.