Organization-oriented chemical programming for the organic design of distributed computing systems

Biochemical information processing found in nature is known to be robust, self-organizing, adaptive, decentralized, asynchronous, fault-tolerant, and evolvable. A couple of approaches are already using the chemical metaphor, such as, Gamma, MGS, amorphous computing, membrane computing, and reaction-diffusion processors. However, in accordance with Conrad's tradeoff principle, programming a chemical computer appears to be difficult. Therefore, in order to further exploit the mentioned properties new programming techniques are required. Here we describe how chemical organization theory can serve as a tool for chemical programming. The theory allows to predict the potential behavior of a chemical program and thus supports a programmer in the design of a chemical-like control system. The approach is demonstrated by applying it to the maximal independent set problem. We show that the desired solutions are predicted by the theory as chemical organizations. Furthermore the theory uncovers "undesirable" organizations, representing uncompleted halting computations due to insufficient amount of molecules. Finally we discuss an architecture for a "chemical virtual machine".