Computations with flexible metamaterials

Bistable beams, controlled by buckling and snapping nonlinearities, naturally act as mechanical bits. The central tenet of this talk is that interactions between such bits allow flexible (meta) materials to store and process information. I will discuss metamaterials that count how often they are compressed and that can select and process input strings composed of complex compression cycles. These materials can be mapped to finite state machines so that their computation power can precisely be characterized. This work shines new light on the nonlinear response of complex materials and opens the door to 'intelligent matter'.