Computational matter: evolving computational solutions in materials

Natural Evolution has been exploiting the physical properties of matter since life first appeared on earth. Evolution-in-materio (EIM) attempts to program matter so that computational problems can be solved. The beauty of this approach is that artificial evolution may be able to utilize unknown physical effects to solve computational problems. This methodology is currently being undertaken in a European research project called NASCENCE: Nanoscale Engineering for Novel Computation using Evolution. In this project, a variety of solutions to computational problems have been evolved using mixtures of carbon nanotubes and polymers at room temperature and also with gold nanoparticles at temperatures less than one Kelvin.