If water or current flows from the other direction, the hose shrinks... 
Gadzooks, don't like the sound of that!
Potentially the chips will function like biological synapses making them ideal for many artificial intelligence applications. The memristor is basically an electrical resistor with memory properties. This discovery may make it possible to fashion advanced logic circuits known as filed programmable gate arrays. These are widely used for rapid prototyping of new circuits and for custom made chips that need to be created quickly.
The original memristor was written about in a a research paper done by a Berkeley electrical engineer named Leon Chua in 1971. His paper titled “Memristor - The Missing Circuit Element” argued that basic electronic theory required that in addition to the three basic elements - resistors, capacitors, and inductors - there is a fourth element that should exist, the memristor. And the HP team created working circuits based on memristors that are as small as 15 nanometers, but they believe that they will be able to make one as small as 4 nanometers.
http://www.gameshout.com/news/hewlett_packard_unveils_new_memory_technology/article10105.htm
memristor (so-called because it is part memory, part resistor)
In the limiting case you have a diode that permits current flow in one direction and not in the other. The "memristor" sounds like a "leaky" diode or a diode with a resistor in parallel to model the backward direction. I'm not convinced it is much of a "breakthrough".
All this, combined with the “dumbing down of America”, and artificial intelligence won’t need to be too smart to outsmart most of us.
Can an AI “lifeform” be far off now?
The hose analogy makes it sound more like a ‘memductor’ than a ‘memristor’.
Sounds like a pretty new term for hysteresis.
Kind of nice to see pioneer HP back at the front lines of technology.
Mark my words. This will have more impact than anything else in the next century.
How is this different than flash memory?
bump
If water or current flows from the other direction, the hose shrinks... Gadzooks, don't like the sound of that!
Wow! A diode!