#35 Lee Cronin - Chemputation, Origin of Life, Assembly Theory

Well, there's different aspects of computing here we've touched on, and I did just want to take a slight tangent onto wet computing and sort of real chemical computing.

I don't know what the exact terminology would be here, but there is this idea, I mean, people have been excited about using even biology as a computer or...

Obviously we have quantum computers, a different framework, we have silicon computers, but could there be a paradigm in a system that you've been thinking a little bit about of wet computation and how far along are we

to that? So we have an information processing team in my group.

And we've been building chemical computers using the Bluzov-Sabotinsky reaction.

And it is possible to use chemistry to compute.

But you have to be very careful about what is a computation.

Many people use the word computation incorrectly.

It's almost like it's everything.

Like if you're like the universe is a computer, then that... doesn't actually have any meaning anymore, right? And there are hard computationists out there that just argue with me about this, and I'm just like, sure, but if you're arguing about what the nature of the universe is, and you say it's a computer, I might as well just say it's, I don't know, it's a turtle on another turtle.

When we come into chemical computers, the question would be, hey, Chemistry involves lots of molecules, many moles of molecules, so many trillions and trillions of molecules.

Is it possible to perhaps encode those molecules so that when they proceed in time and react, they will effectively process information? So when you decode them, you'll get out the answer to a question.

Mm-hmm.

And that's actually quite hard because molecules undergo chemical reactions.

You're trying to impose a constraint on them, a labeling scheme.

It's not impossible.

My team have done it with a Bluzov-Savoskinsky reaction to kind of do a type of chemical gradient descent.

What

is that reaction you mentioned there?

It's an oscillating chemical reaction.

So it oscillates between two colors, red and blue, red and blue, red and blue.

We made a grid that's fluidically connected.

And each grid we put...

there were basically, it was a seven by seven array.

So there's 49 cells all connected and you could have each of them oscillating a different color.