A professor of engineering at the University of Florida hopes to "re-create the personal computer" by making it more chaotic. At present, PC motherboards are carefully organized sets of specialized chips, but William Ditto is designing a machine whose ungrouped chips could perform any number of different tasks when called upon. The "chaos motherboard," Mr. Ditto says, could eventually be faster—and easier to produce—than current models.
But don’t expect to be using a chaos motherboard any time soon: No current operating system could function on such a machine.
