General theory of non-digital computing

Contact person: Prof. Dr. Herbert Jaeger

Driven by the need to develop computing systems that consume orders of magnitude less energy than current digital microprocessors, worldwide research activities in so-called unconventional computing (also known as physical computing or in-materio computing) technologies are steeply gaining momentum. The general strategy is to exploit nonlinear, nanoscale or quantum physical phenomena of all sorts (electrical, electro-magnetic, spin dynamics, optical, and even chemical and nano-mechanical) for computational operations. This research is not necessarily brain-inspired or neuron-like but explores any kind of physical opportunity. Collaborating with materials scientists, mathematicians and theoretical computer scientists, the group of Dr. Jaeger researches wide-reaching formal generalizations of the digital computing paradigm which could explain how "computing" can arise in unconventional physical substrates, paving the way to a generalized engineering science of physical computing systems.