Using the examples of an excitable chemical system (the Belousov–Zhabotinsky medium) and plasmodium of Physarum polycephalum we show that universal computation in a geometrically unconstrained medium is only possible when resources (excitability or concentration of nutrients) are limited. In situations of limited resources the systems studied develop traveling localizations. These localizations are the elementary units of dynamical logical circuits in collision-based computing architectures.
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Adamatzky et al. (2008) studied this question.
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