Abstract
Chemical information processing possesses a variety of valuable properties, such as robustness, concurrency, fault-tolerance and evolvability. However, it is difficult to predict and program a chemical system because the computation emerges as a global phenomenon from microscopic reactions. For programming chemical systems a theoretical method to cope with that emergent behaviour is desirable. Here we will review design principles for chemical programs. We focus on programs that should compute a qualitative and not a quantitative result. The design principles are based on chemical organisation theory, which defines a chemical organisation as a closed and self-maintaining set of molecular species. The fundamental assumption of so-called organisation-oriented programming is that computation should be understood as a movement between chemical organisations. In this case we expect that the resulting system is more robust and fine-tuning of the kinetic laws will be less important. As examples for the usage of this design method we show a logic gate and a solution to the maximal independent set problem implemented as artificial chemistries.
Keywords
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Matsumaru, N., Kreyssig, P., Dittrich, P. (2011). Organisation-Oriented Chemical Programming. In: Müller-Schloer, C., Schmeck, H., Ungerer, T. (eds) Organic Computing — A Paradigm Shift for Complex Systems. Autonomic Systems, vol 1. Springer, Basel. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-0348-0130-0_13
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-0348-0130-0_13
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