On Cornell Engineering Week: What can the natural world tell us about computers?

Hunter Adams, assistant teaching professor of electrical and computer engineering, examines what we can learn from nature.

Hunter Adams is an assistant teaching professor at Cornell University’s School of Electrical and Computer Engineering. As a former Cornell student with degrees in physics and aerospace engineering, he worked in the Laboratory for Elementary Particle Physics before joining the Space Systems Design Studio where he managed a team of engineers constructing a spacecraft called Violet. As a faculty member, Adams enjoys working with students and collaborating with researchers in a range of disciplines, including plant sciences, veterinary science, electrical engineering, ornithology, and computer science.

Let me ask you a deceptively difficult question: What is a computer?We can all point to examples of computers. Things like laptops, cell phones, slide rules, and calculators. But what is the property that all these items share which makes them computers? Are there other objects, objects that we don’t typically think of as “computers,” which share this property?Here’s a definition: a computer is anything which usefully transforms one quantity into another quantity. All of the engineered systems that I’ve just listed share this property, but so do many natural systems that we don’t typically think of as computers!We could point to lots of examples. Want to find the shortest path through a complicated environment? No need to build a computer or write a program, just re- create that environment around an ant colony and allow them to find the path for you! Want to classify objects moving through a forest? The woodland creatures react in different ways to different sorts of intrusions. Use the birds, bees, and megafauna as a giant neural net that performs classification by way of their unique responses to cars, people, drones, or whatever else.These and other natural systems are modeled by equations, and the goal of many scientists is to find these equations. But any system that can be modeled by an equation can also be used as a special-purpose computer for solving that equation! Natural computing does not use math to model nature, it uses nature to do math, and to store and process data!The supercomputers of the future will not be constructed at the cost of nature, but will include nature. In addition to giving us access to lots more compute, this has the potential to guarantee nature’s preservation. As soon as healthy forests generate more dollars than lumber, we won’t need fences around our forests. The economic value of the forest, and of all other natural systems, may lay in its ability to process, store, and move data.Maybe, we can save the planet by turning it into a computer.

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