Peter Schmidt-Nielsen, Kailiang Chen, Jonathan Bachrach, Scott Greenwald, Forrest Green, Neil Gershenfeld

Abstract

Computer science has served to insulate programs and programmers from knowledge of the underlying mechanisms used to manipulate information, however this fiction is increasingly hard to maintain as computing devices decrease in size and systems increase in complexity. Manifestations of these limits appearing in computers include scaling issues in interconnect, dissipation, and coding. Reconfigurable Asynchronous Logic Automata (RALA) is an alternative formulation of computation that seeks to align logical and physical descriptions by exposing rather than hiding this underlying reality. Instead of physical units being represented in computer programs only as abstract symbols, RALA is based on a lattice of cells that asynchronously pass state tokens corresponding to physical resources. We introduce the design of RALA, review its relationships to its many progenitors, and discuss its benefits, implementation, programming, and extensions