A functionally complete logic gate in a soft photoresponsive hydrogel
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Materials that compute-or process stimuli to generate a result output-are important in applications ranging from soft robotics to therapeutics. Here, we report a NAND gate based on the interactions of three self-trapped beams in a photoresponsive hydrogel. The beams self-trap by triggering localised contraction and corresponding refractive index changes (Δn) and communicate with each other through the interconnected hydrogel network. Light-induced Δn in one region suppresses contraction (and Δn) elsewhere. This inhibits self-trapping and reduces the power of the central beam-which competes with two equidistant neighbours-compared to either peripheral beam, which competes with just one neighbour. The NAND gate exploits this geometry-dependent inhibition: the central beam's peak power-the output-exceeds a threshold value unless both neighbours-inputs-are on, i.e., an output = 0 is retrieved only with input [1, 1]. We then demonstrate two and, separately, twelve sequentially chained NAND operations, and propose a route to multiple, simultaneously linked operations in a single, internally mediated step. Here, the output from one operation is spontaneously directed to subsequent operations. Our findings open pathways to soft materials with autonomous computational functionality.
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".