Communications of the ACM
Inside the Lab Growing Mushroom Computers
With fungal computers, mycelia — the branching, web-like root structure of the fungus — act as conductors, as well as the electronic components of a computer.
Credit: Andrew Adamatzky
The Unconventional Computing Laboratory (UCL) of the U.K.'s University of the West of England focuses on the development of chemical or living computers that can interface with hardware and software.
Examples include fungal computers that utilize mycelium as electronics and conductors in order to enable new forms of information processing and analysis.
The researchers found mycelium with different geometrical arrangements can compute different logical functions and can map circuits based on received electrical responses; UCL's Andrew Adamatzky suggested this could lead to neuromorphic circuits.
Fungal computers' self-regenerative abilities could improve fault tolerance, reconfigurability, and energy efficiency, despite their inability to match the speeds of current computers.
From Popular Science
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