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A Probabilistic Chemical Programmable Computer

The exponential growth of the power of modern digital computers is based upon the miniaturisation of vast nanoscale arrays of electronic switches, but this will be eventually constrained by fabrication limits and power dissipation. Chemical processes have the potential to scale beyond these limits performing computations through chemical reactions, yet the lack of well-defined programmability limits their scalability and performance. We present a hybrid digitally programmable chemical array as a probabilistic computational machine that uses chemical oscillators partitioned in interconnected cells as a computational substrate. This hybrid architecture performs efficient computation by distributing between chemical and digital domains together with error correction. The efficiency is gained by combining digital with probabilistic chemical logic based on nearest neighbour interactions and hysteresis effects. We demonstrated the implementation of one- and two- dimensional Chemical Cellular Automata and solutions to combinatorial optimization problems.