From chemical soup to computing circuit: Transforming a contiguous chemical medium into a logic gate network by modulating its external conditions

TL;DR

This paper demonstrates how external modulation of a spatially-extended chemical medium can create an integrated network of logic gates, enabling chemical computation of complex functions like a full-adder.

Contribution

It generalizes previous work by showing how to transform a chemical medium into a functional logic circuit, specifically a full-adder, through external condition modulation.

Findings

Successfully created a chemical full-adder circuit.

Extended the method from well-stirred to spatially-extended systems.

Demonstrated the formation of diverse logic gates within a single chemical medium.

Abstract

It has been shown that it is possible to transform a well-stirred chemical medium into a logic-gate simply by varying the chemistry's external conditions (feed rates, lighting conditions, etc). We extend this work, showing that the same method can be generalized to spatially-extended systems. We vary the external conditions of a well-known chemical medium (a cubic autocatalytic reaction diffusion model), so that different regions of the simulated chemistry are operating under particular conditions at particular times. In so doing, we are able to transform the initially uniform chemistry, not just into a single logic gate, but into a functionally integrated network of diverse logic gates that operate as a basic computational circuit known as a full-adder.