Fungal Motherboards?

Chemical or living tissue computers that can be linked to electronic components?    The ultimate example of  Biochemical collaboration.   Fungi computing?   Embedded regeneration?  UnConventual to be sure. 

ACM TECHNEWS

Inside the Lab Growing Mushroom Computers    By Popular Science, March 3, 202

A mushroom motherboard.

With fungal computers, mycelia — the branching, web-like root structure of the fungus — act as conductors, as well as the electronic components of a computer.

The Unconventional Computing Laboratory (UCL) of the U.K.'s University of the West of England focuses on the development of chemical or living computers that can interface with hardware and software.

Examples include fungal computers that utilize mycelium as electronics and conductors in order to enable new forms of information processing and analysis.

The researchers found mycelium with different geometrical arrangements can compute different logical functions and can map circuits based on received electrical responses; UCL's Andrew Adamatzky suggested this could lead to neuromorphic circuits.

Fungal computers' self-regenerative abilities could improve fault tolerance, reconfigurability, and energy efficiency, despite their inability to match the speeds of current computers.

From Popular Science   https://www.popsci.com/technology/unconventional-computing-lab-mushroom/ 

Chip Makers, Once in High Demand, Confront Sudden Challenges

 Supply Chains, Designs,Contexts

Chip Makers, Once in High Demand, Confront Sudden Challenges

By The New York Times, October 28, 2022

A few months ago, makers of computer chips seemed on top of the world.

Customers could not get enough of the small slices of silicon, which act as the brains of computers and are needed in just about every device with an on-off switch. Demand was so strong — and U.S. dependence on a foreign manufacturer so worrying — that Democrats and Republicans agreed in July on a $52 billion subsidy package that included grants to build new chip factories in America.

U.S. chip makers such as Intel, Micron Technology, Texas Instruments and GlobalFoundries pledged huge expansions in domestic manufacturing, betting on a growing need for their products and the prospects of federal subsidies.

But lately, supplies of some semiconductors are piling up, which could spell good news for consumers but not for industry executives. Their bold investment plans are running into a sudden and unexpected slowdown in consumer demand for electronic gadgets, new U.S. restrictions on sales to customers in China, rising inflation and the unusual prospect of a simultaneous shortage of some chips and glut of others.

From The New York Times    

Can Computers Be Mathematicians?

Would make sense, hypotheses could be automatically spun off into tests as needed. 

Can Computers Be Mathematicians?    By The Joy of Why  in ACM Opinion, July 5, 2022

"I think that one of the things that's happening in this collaboration is that computer scientists are beginning to learn more about the nature of what modern mathematics actually looks like." -Kevin Buzzard

For the last few years, researchers and amateurs all over the world have worked together to translate the essential axioms of mathematics into a programming language called Lean. Armed with this knowledge, theorem-proving programs that understand Lean have begun helping some of the world's greatest mathematicians verify their work.

In an interview, Kevin Buzzard, professor of pure mathematics at Imperial College London, talks about the effort to "teach" math to Lean—and how projects like this one could shape the future of mathematics.

From The Joy of Why   

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