Michail-Antisthenis Tsompanas
Dr. Tsompanas is a Senior Lecturer at University of the West of England, associated with the Department of Computer Science and Creative Technologies, and involved with unconventional and bio-inspired computations.
Abstract — Cellular automata (CA) have long served as powerful computational models for simulating a variety of chemical, biological, and physical phenomena. Among the chemical systems modelled by CA, the Belousov–Zhabotinsky (BZ) reaction stands out as a characteristic example of nonlinear chemical oscillations and self-organization. These characteristics have inspired the use of BZ as a foundation for chemical computing.
Building on insights from CA modelling, the underlying principles of such chemical processes have been transferred into electronic implementations, most notably through memristor-based oscillators. These systems emulate reaction–diffusion dynamics in silico and have demonstrated the capability to perform multiple Boolean logic operations within the same architecture. This talk will explore how CA provide a conceptual and computational bridge between chemical computing and memristive electronic architectures, emphasizing their potential for enabling massively parallel, hardware-accelerated computational systems.