The article focuses on the primitive developmental stage of amorphous computing exploiting two new technologies of microfabrication and cellular engineering, which will precipitate fundamental changes in methods for constructing and programming computers. For coherent behavior from vast numbers of unreliable microsensors, actuators and communication devices interconnected in unknown ways, apply lessons of cellular cooperation in biological organisms. An amorphous computing medium is a system of irregularly placed, asynchronous, locally interacting computing elements, which can be modeled as a collection of "computational particles" sprinkled irregularly on a surface or mixed throughout a volume as they are all fabricated by the same process. Mechanisms of wave propagation are well-matched to amorphous computing, because the gross phenomena of growth, inhibition, and tropism are insensitive to the precise arrangement of the individual particles, as long as the distribution is reasonably dense, which made the author to develop a programming growing-point language, enabling to specify complex patterns. In the article, the author points out that it can not be anticipated that cellular computing, which takes hint from biology, in itself will be a good way to solve computationally difficult problems. On the other hand, the ability to organize cells into precise patterns and to cause cells to secrete chemical components could be the foundation for the engineering construction of complex extracellular structures and precise control of fabrication at the subnanometer level.

Author Affiliations: 1Professor of Computer Science and Engineering in the