{"id":315050,"date":"2021-08-03T22:43:36","date_gmt":"2021-08-03T19:43:36","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/en.buradabiliyorum.com\/how-chemical-reactions-compute\/"},"modified":"2021-08-03T22:43:36","modified_gmt":"2021-08-03T19:43:36","slug":"how-chemical-reactions-compute","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/buradabiliyorum.com\/en\/how-chemical-reactions-compute\/","title":{"rendered":"#How chemical reactions compute"},"content":{"rendered":"

“#How chemical reactions compute<\/strong>”<\/p>\n

\n
\n
\n
\"molecule\"
\n Credit: Pixabay\/CC0 Public Domain
\n <\/figcaption><\/figure>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n

A single molecule contains a wealth of information. It includes not only the number of each kind of constituent atom, but also how they’re arranged and how they attach to each other. And during chemical reactions, that information determines the outcome and becomes transformed. Molecules collide, break apart, reassemble, and rebuild in predictable ways.<\/p>\n


\n <\/section>\n<\/p>\n

There’s another way of looking at a chemical reaction, says Santa Fe Institute External Professor Juan-P\u00e9rez Mercader, who is a physicist and astrobiologist based at Harvard University. It’s a kind of computation. A computing device is one that takes information as its input, then mechanically transforms that information and produces some output with a functional purpose. The input and output can be almost anything: Numbers, letters, objects, images, symbols, or something else.<\/p>\n

Or, says P\u00e9rez-Mercader, molecules. When molecules react, they’re following the same steps that describe computation: Input, transformation, output. “It’s a computation that controls when certain events take place,” says P\u00e9rez-Mercader, “but at the nanometer scale, or shorter.” <\/p>\n

Molecules may be small, but their potential as tools of computation is enormous. “This is a very powerful computing tool that needs to be harnessed,” he says, noting that a single mole of a substance has 10^23 elementary chemical processors capable of computation. For the last few years, P\u00e9rez-Mercader has been developing a new field he calls “native chemical computation.” It’s a multifaceted quest: He wants to not only exploit chemical computing but also find challenges for which it’s best-suited.<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

\n