Dittrich, Peter, Wolfgang Banzhaf, Hilmar Rauhe, and Jens Ziegler. “Macroscopic and microscopic computation in an artificial chemistry.” In Draft Proc. Second German Workshop on Artificial Life , pp. 19-22. 1997.
URL1 URL2
Chemical and biochemical systems as part of living organisms have been shown to possess interesting computational properties [1, 2, 7]. As an example Figure 1 shows the information flow in the chemotaxis system of Escherichia Coli [10]. In a parallel development, the chemical computation metaphor is becoming more and more frequently used as part of the emergent computation paradigm in Computer Science [3, 4, 5, 6, 8]. In this contribution we will discuss two ways of how information can be processed by a collection of molecules floating around in well-stirred tank reactor. In the first case the information is stored as a concentration of a substances and computation is carried out by increase and decrease of concentration levels. We will refer to this as macroscopic computation.