Amorphous computing refers to computational systems that use very large numbers of identical, parallel processors each having limited computational ability and local interactions. The term Amorphous Computing was coined at MIT in 1996 in a paper entitled "Amorphous Computing Manifesto" by Abelson, Knight, Sussman, et al.
Contents
Examples of naturally occurring amorphous computations can be found in many fields, such as: developmental biology (the development of multicellular organisms from a single cell), molecular biology (the organization of sub-cellular compartments and intra-cell signaling), neural networks, and chemical engineering (non-equilibrium systems) to name a few. The study of amorphous computation is hardware agnostic—it is not concerned with the physical substrate (biological, electronic, nanotech, etc.) but rather with the characterization of amorphous algorithms as abstractions with the goal of both understanding existing natural examples and engineering novel systems.
Amorphous computers tend to have many of the following properties:
Algorithms, tools, and patterns
(Some of these algorithms have no known names. Where a name is not known, a descriptive one is given.)
Researchers and labs
Documents
- The Amorphous Computing Home Page
- Amorphous Computing (Communications of the ACM, May 2000)
- "Amorphous computing in the presence of stochastic disturbances"
- Amorphous Computing Slides from DARPA talk in 1998
- Amorphous and Cellular Computing PPT from 2002 NASA Lecture
- Infrastructure for Engineered Emergence on Sensor/Actuator Networks, Beal and Bachrach, 2006.
- Self-repairing Topological Patterns Clement, Nagpal.
- Robust Methods of Amorphous Synchronization, Joshua Grochow
- Programmable Self-Assembly: Constructing Global Shape Using Biologically-Inspired Local Interactions and Origami Mathematics and Associated Slides Nagpal PhD Thesis
- Towards a Programmable Material, Nagpal Associated Slides
- Self-Healing Structures in Amorphous Computing Zucker
- Resilient serial execution on amorphous machines, Sutherland Master's Thesis
- Paradigms for Structure in an Amorphous Computer, 1997 Coore, Nagpal, Weiss
- Organizing a Global Coordinate System from Local Information on an Amorphous Computer, 1999 Nagpal.
- Amorphous Computing: examples, mathematics and theory, 2013 W Richard Stark.