interesting

One of the weirdest computers ever built forsakes traditional hardware in favour of "gloopware". Andrew Adamatzky at the University of the West of England, UK, can make interfering waves of propagating ions in a chemical goo behave like logic gates, the building blocks of computers.



The waves are produced by a pulsing cyclic chemical reaction called the Belousov-Zhabotinsky reaction.



Adamatzky has shown that his chemical logic gates can be used to make a robotic hand stir the mixture in which they exist. As the robot's fingers stimulate the chemicals further reactions are triggered that control the hand.



The result is a sort of robotic existential paradox – did the chemical brain make the robot's hand move, or the hand tell the brain what to think? Eventually Adamatzky aims to couple these chemical computers to an electroactive gel-based "skin" to create a complete "blob-bot".