Programming an Amorphous Computational Medium

Amorphous computing considers the problem of controlling millions of spatially distributed unreliable devices which communicate only with nearby neighbors. To program such a system, we need a high-level description language for desired global behaviors, and a system to compile such descriptions into locally executing code which robustly creates and maintains the desired global behavior. I survey existing amorphous computing primitives and give desiderata for a language describing computation on an amorphous computer. I then bring these together in Amorphous Medium Language, which computes on an amorphous computer as though it were a space-filling computational medium.

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