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Introduction

An Amorphous Computing medium is a highly redundant, massively parallel, asynchronous computing system. Because it makes no assumptions about any precision interconnect or precision geometrical arrangement of the parts, it is an ideal environment for exploring issues of robust design.[1] Recent work in this area has focused on demonstrating that amorphous media can be configured to generate highly complex spatial patterns. Examples of configurable patterns include Euclidean constructions, branching structures, and simple text [3]. In the spirit of robust design, we pose the following question: What happens if these prespecified patterns are later damaged by the external environment, or by defects in the computational units? Under what circumstances can the amorphous computing environment recover from such errors, and what consistency checking strategies might it employ to find them?





Jeremy Zucker
2000-06-10