Designing Biological Computers: Systemic Computation and Sensor Networks

  • Authors:

  • Peter J. Bentley

  • Affiliations:

  • Department of Computer Science, University College London, London,

  • Venue:
  • Bio-Inspired Computing and Communication
  • Year:
  • 2008

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Abstract

Biological computation may or may not be Turing Complete, but it is clearly organized differently from traditional von Neumann architectures. Computation (whether in a brain or an ant colony) is distributed, self-organising, autonomous and embodied in its environments. Systemic computation is a model of computation designed to follow the "biological way" of computation: it relies on the notion that systems are transformed through interaction in some context, with all computation equivalent to controlled transformations. This model implies a distributed, stochastic architecture, and in this work it is proposed that a physical implementation of this architecture could be achieved through the use of wireless devices produced for sensor networks. A useful, fault-tolerant and autonomous computer could exploit all the features of sensor networks, providing benefits for our understanding of "natural computing" and robust wireless networking.