Achieving Operational Universality through a Turing Complete Chemputer

TL;DR

This paper demonstrates that a chemically-aware programming language applied to a Turing complete robotic platform can enable universal chemical synthesis, allowing complex molecule production through programmable, automated processes with potential for high-level abstraction and error correction.

Contribution

It introduces a Turing complete framework for chemical synthesis using robotic platforms and a specialized programming language, advancing automation and complexity in chemical manufacturing.

Findings

Over 78 million chemical states explored using RGB color space proxy.

Demonstrated Turing completeness with conditional logic and color gamut.

Established a formal framework for complex chemical programming and error correction.

Abstract

The most fundamental abstraction underlying all modern computers is the Turing Machine, that is if any modern computer can simulate a Turing Machine, an equivalence which is called Turing completeness, it is theoretically possible to achieve any task that can be algorithmically described by executing a series of discrete unit operations. In chemistry, the ability to program chemical processes is demanding because it is hard to ensure that the process can be understood at a high level of abstraction, and then reduced to practice. Herein we exploit the concept of Turing completeness applied to robotic platforms for chemistry that can be used to synthesise complex molecules through unit operations that execute chemical processes using a chemically-aware programming language, XDL. We leverage the concept of computability by computers to synthesizability of chemical compounds by automated synthesis machines. The results of an interactive demonstration of Turing completeness using the colour gamut and conditional logic are presented and examples of chemical use-cases are discussed. Over 16.7 million combinations of Red, Green, Blue (RGB) colour space were binned into 5 discrete values and measured over 10 regions of interest (ROIs), affording 78 million possible states per step and served as a proxy for conceptual, chemical space exploration. This formal description establishes a formal framework in future chemical programming languages to ensure complex logic operations are expressed and executed correctly, with the possibility of error correction, in the automated and autonomous pursuit of increasingly complex molecules.