Speaker
Description
Recent technological advances allow us to view chemical mass-action systems as analog computers. In this context, the inputs to a computation are encoded as initial values of certain chemical species while the outputs are the limiting values of other chemical species. The broad goal of this nascent field is to develop systems that can operate in the niche of a (wet) cellular environment, rather than to directly compete with modern digital computers.
There have been numerous works that design reaction networks that carry out basic arithmetic. However, in general, these constructions have speeds of computation (i.e., rates of convergence) that depend intimately upon the inputs to the computation itself, sometimes making them unusably slow. In this talk, I will discuss how we designed a full suite of “elementary” chemical systems that carry out arithmetic computations (such as inversion, addition, roots, multiplication, rectified subtraction, absolute difference, etc.) over the real numbers, and that have speeds of computation that are independent of the inputs to the computations. Moreover, we proved that finite sequences of such elementary modules, running in parallel, can carry out composite arithmetic over real numbers, also at a rate that is independent of inputs. I will close with a number of open questions and directions for future work.
