Outlining an Unconventional, Adaptive, and Particle-Based Reconfigurable Computer Architecture

The quest for novel and unconventional computing machines is mainly motivated by the man-machine dichotomy and by the belief that dealing with new physical computing substrates, new environments, and new applications will require new paradigms to organize, train, program, and to interact with them. The goal of this contribution is to delineate a possible way to address the general scientific challenge of seeking for further progress and new metaphors in computer science by means of unconventional approaches. Here we outline an amalgamation of (1) a particle-based, randomly interconnected, and reconfigurable substrate, (2) membrane systems, and (3) artificial chemistries in combination with (4) an unconventional adaptation paradigm.