Amorphous computing

Amorphous computing refers to computational systems that use very large numbers of identical, parallel processors each having limited computational ability and local interactions. The term Amorphous Computing was coined at MIT in 1996 in a paper entitled "Amorphous Computing Manifesto" by Abelson, Knight, Sussman, et al.

Examples of naturally occurring amorphous computations can be found in many fields, such as: developmental biology (the development of multicellular organisms from a single cell), molecular biology (the organization of sub-cellular compartments and intra-cell signaling), neural networks, and chemical engineering (non-equilibrium systems) to name a few. The study of amorphous computation is hardware agnostic—it is not concerned with the physical substrate (biological, electronic, nanotech, etc.) but rather with the characterization of amorphous algorithms as abstractions with the goal of both understanding existing natural examples and engineering novel systems.

Amorphous computers tend to have many of the following properties:

(Some of these algorithms have no known names. Where a name is not known, a descriptive one is given.)

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