Weirdware: Touchable Unconventional Computers

Weirdware reveals a universe where computation emerges from life, chemistry, and matter itself--from maze-solving slime moulds and electrically active mushrooms to light-sensing kombucha mats, crystals that compute geometry, droplets that collide like logic gates, and finally, nanoparticles that "learn" from experience. Drawing on decades of original laboratory research, this book explores eight astonishing forms of natural and chemical computing, showing how soft, living, and self-organizing materials process information without chips, codes, or silicon. Weirdware invites you into a future where intelligence is not manufactured, but cultivated--computers grown like mushrooms, brewed like tea, or mixed like paint.