Unlocking Photonic Computing Power with Artificial ‘Life'

New research by Caltech's Alireza Marandi, assistant professor of electrical engineering and applied physics, uses optical hardware to realize cellular automata, a type of computer model consisting of a "world" (a gridded area) containing "cells" (each square of the grid) that can live, die, reproduce, and evolve into multicellular creatures with their own unique behaviors. These automata have been used to perform computing tasks and, according to Marandi, they are ideally suited to photonic technologies. [Caltech story]