Programming an Amorphous Computational Medium

Abstract

Amorphous computing considers the problem of controllingmillions of spatially distributed unreliable devices which communicateonly with nearby neighbors. To program such a system, we need a highleveldescription language for desired global behaviors, and a system tocompile such descriptions into locally executing code which robustly createsand maintains the desired global behavior. I survey existing amorphouscomputing primitives and give desiderata for a language describingcomputation on an amorphous computer. I then bring these together inAmorphous Medium Language, which computes on an amorphous computeras though it were a space-filling computational medium.