Mechanical Bits and Emergent Computing in Metamaterials
Slender ele
ments are the workhorse of mechanical metamaterials and naturally act as mechanical bits. The central tenet of this talk is that interactions between such bits allow flexible (meta) materials to store and process information. I will illustrate this general idea with metamaterials that count, recognize sequential patterns, and embed Boolean logic and flipflops. This strategy can be generalized to other domains: material bits and complex energy landscapes play a role in a wide variety of materials. Hence our work may open an avenue to realize information processing in materia.