DYNAMICAL LOGICAL CIRCUITS IN SUBEXCITABLE CHEMICAL MEDIA Pilot project: PhD Studentship in Collision-Based Computing in Excitable Media

We are seeking fuding for two PhD studentship positions aimed for interdisciplinary research, knowledge transfer and training in non-classical computation, the field of science emerging at the boundary between novel and nature-inspired computing paradigms and architectures, and non-linear chemistry and physics. We will explore complex behaviour and interaction dynamics of localised mobile excitation patterns to design working prototypes of architectureless computing devices. We experimentally demonstrate that excitation wave-fragments in a Belousov-Zhabotinsky (BZ) medium with immobilised catalyst can be used to build elementary logical gates and circuits, and to simulate certain classes of mathematical machines. We represent information values of variables by the presence/absence or structure of wave-fragments. The wave-fragments may annihilate, fuse, split and change their velocity vectors as a result of collision with other wave-fragments --- thus the values of variables represented by the wave-fragments change and certain logical operations and information processing operations are implemented. We aim to theoretically design and experimentally build a universal collision-based massively-parallel processor based on excitable chemical reactions, where the space-time dynamics of travelling localised excitations realise embedded logical and arithmetical circuits and mathematical machines.