A robust universal flying amorphous computer

Abstract

Amorphous computers are systems that derive their computational capability from the operation of vast numbers of simple, identical, randomly distributed and locally communicating units. The wireless communication ability and the memory capacity of the computational units is severely restricted due to their minimal size. Moreover, the units originally have no identifiers and can only use simple asynchronous communication protocols that cannot guarantee a reliable message delivery. In this work we concentrate on a so-called robust flying amorphous computer whose units are in a constant motion. The units are modeled by miniature RAMs communicating via radio. For this model we design a distributed probabilistic communication protocol and an algorithmenabling a simulation of a RAM in finite time. Our model is robust in the sense that if one or several computational units fail the computer will autonomously restart and reconfigure itself in order to initiate the computation anew. The underlying algorithms make use of a number of original ideas having no counterpart in the classical theory of distributed computing.