Abstract
Granular metamaterials are a promising choice for the realization of mechanical computing devices. As preliminary evidence of this, we demonstrate here how to embed Boolean logic gates (AND and XOR) into a granular metamaterial by evolving where particular grains are placed in the material. Our results confirm the existence of gradients of increasing “AND-ness” and “XOR-ness” within the space of possible materials that can be followed by evolutionary search. We measure the computational functionality of a material by probing how it transforms bits encoded as vibrations with zero or non-zero amplitude. We compared the evolution of materials built from mass-contrasting particles and materials built from stiffness-contrasting particles, and found that the latter were more evolvable. We believe this work may pave the way toward evolutionary design of increasingly sophisticated, programmable, and computationally dense metamaterials with certain advantages over more traditional computational substrates.
This material is based upon work supported by the National Science Foundation under the DMREF program (award number: 2118810).
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Acknowledgment
The authors would like to thank Qikai Wu for providing the simulator for mass-contrasting assembly of circular particles. The computational resources provided by the Vermont Advanced Computing Core are also gratefully acknowledged.
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Parsa, A., Wang, D., O’Hern, C.S., Shattuck, M.D., Kramer-Bottiglio, R., Bongard, J. (2022). Evolution of Acoustic Logic Gates in Granular Metamaterials. In: Jiménez Laredo, J.L., Hidalgo, J.I., Babaagba, K.O. (eds) Applications of Evolutionary Computation. EvoApplications 2022. Lecture Notes in Computer Science, vol 13224. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-02462-7_7
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