Exploring Logic Artificial Chemistries: An Illogical Attempt?

TL;DR

This paper explores nature-inspired artificial chemistries and membrane systems as a novel, robust, and distributed paradigm for Boolean computing, demonstrating their potential despite significant implementation costs.

Contribution

It provides a pragmatic evaluation of artificial chemistries for Boolean logic, highlighting their robustness and spatial extension capabilities in distributed environments.

Findings

Artificial chemistries can implement Boolean logic functions.

Systems can be made more robust through specific approaches.

Distributed artificial chemistries enable spatially extended computation.

Abstract

Robustness to a wide variety of negative factors and the ability to self-repair is an inherent and natural characteristic of all life forms on earth. As opposed to nature, man-made systems are in most cases not inherently robust and a significant effort has to be made in order to make them resistant against failures. This can be done in a wide variety of ways and on various system levels. In the field of digital systems, for example, techniques such as triple modular redundancy (TMR) are frequently used, which results in a considerable hardware overhead. Biologically-inspired computing by means of bio-chemical metaphors offers alternative paradigms, which need to be explored and evaluated. Here, we are interested to evaluate the potential of nature-inspired artificial chemistries and membrane systems as an alternative information representing and processing paradigm in order to obtain robust and spatially extended Boolean computing systems in a distributed environment. We investigate conceptual approaches inspired by artificial chemistries and membrane systems and compare proof-of-concepts. First, we show, that elementary logical functions can be implemented. Second, we illustrate how they can be made more robust and how they can be assembled to larger-scale systems. Finally, we discuss the implications for and paths to possible genuine implementations. Compared to the main body of work in artificial chemistries, we take a very pragmatic and implementation-oriented approach and are interested in realizing Boolean computations only. The results emphasize that artificial chemistries can be used to implement Boolean logic in a spatially extended and distributed environment and can also be made highly robust, but at a significant price.