Nicholas Haisler, Khalid Mohammed, and Garrett Provence, Drake University
Nicholas Haisler, Khalid Mohammed, and Garrett Provence
Drake University
Expanding Computation Beyond 0s and 1s
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Computation doesn’t take place only through laptops and logic gates—it can also be carried out by analog circuits and by carefully designed chemical reactions. In this talk we’ll introduce two alternative ways to ‘write’ a program: General-Purpose Analog Computers (GPACs), which describe computation with differential equations, and Chemical Reaction Networks (CRNs), where molecular concentrations serve as variables and reactions act like instructions. We’ll build the ideas from the ground up - first explaining why you might design a program as a GPAC in order to implement it at a molecular scale. Then we’ll discuss the GPAC-to-CRN translation process and its shortcomings. Our new contribution is an optimization of that translation process, which we call dual-railing: instead of doubling every variable to avoid negative concentrations, we carefully choose just the ones that matter. The result is a smaller molecular program that preserves the behavior of the original system.
