On growing computers from living biological cells

Abstract

The technology behind the computers, and all sorts of data processing devices pervading our daily lives, are underpinned by paradigms such as the Turing machine, the von Neumann architecture, the Harvard architecture, and so on, which were invented in the 1930 and 1940s (Rojas and Hashagen in The First Computers – History and Architectures, The MIT Press, Cambridge, MA [29]; Soare in Turing Computability, Springer, Cham, Switzerland [33]). These paradigms are so successful that they still prevail in the design of today’s digital computers. We are interested in harnessing biological systems to build new kinds of processors for Artificial Intelligence, music and creativity. Our ambition is to develop electronic components, data processors and eventually full-fledged computers, with living organisms, such as bacteria and slime mould. This chapter focuses on the work that is being developed with slime mould at the University of Plymouth’s Interdisciplinary Centre for Computer Music Research (ICCMR). It tells the story a wild musical idea, born in 2009, and which resulted in the development of a biological processor that is capable of improvising music and doing Boolean logics.