Universality of Evolved Cellular Automata in-Materio STEFANO NICHELE12?,SIGVE SEBASTIAN FARSTAD1,GUNNAR TUFTE1 1 Department of Computer and Information Science, Norwegian University of Science and Technology, Norway 2 Department of Computer Science, Oslo and Akershus University College of Applied Sciences, Norway Received xxxxx; In final form xxxxx Evolution-in-Materio (EIM) is a method of using artificial evolu- tion to exploit physical properties of materials for computation. It has previously been successfully used to evolve a multitude of different computational devices implemented in physical ma- terials. One of the biggest problems in exploiting materials is finding a good computational abstraction to carry computation on top of the underlying physical process. This paper presents elementary cellular automata (CA) as a possible abstraction and presents successfully evolved CA transition functions in single- walled carbon nanotube (SWCNT) and polymer composite ma- terials. Such implementation allows reasoning about the compu- tational capabilities of materials and draw analogies with cellu- lar automata complexity and computation at the Edge of Chaos. This work is done within the European Project NASCENCE. Key words: Evolution-in-Materio, Cellular Automata, Edge of Chaos, Single-Walled Carbon Nanotubes, Complexity, Computational Materi- als. ? email:
[email protected] 1 1 INTRODUCTION The natural evolutionary process, in stark contrast to the traditional human top-down building-block-oriented engineering approach, is not one of ab- straction, componentization and careful manipulation based on an under- standing of underlying mechanics. Rather, it is a ”blind-yet-guided” meta- heuristic approach able to exploit properties to create ”designs” without need- ing to understand them or the underlying mechanics that power them.