Small steps towards the development of chemical artificial intelligent systems

Abstract

Researchers working in the field of Artificial Intelligence and human-level intelligent agents are driven by the ambitious projects of understanding the foundations and running mechanisms of the human mind, and trying to reproduce them artificially. These projects have been receiving a renewed spur by the research initiative named “The Decade of the Mind” since 2007. A deep understanding of how the mind perceives, thinks, and acts, and its imitation will have a revolutionary impact in science, medicine, economic growth, security, and well-being. Our intelligence grounds on the working mechanism of the human nervous system. The human nervous system is a “computational machine” based on a complex “wetware” of neuronal cells collecting, relaying, processing and storing information under the shape of electrochemical signals. It is worthwhile trying to imitate human intelligence by using chemical systems. In this review, two types of chemical artificial intelligent systems are presented: (a) the sensing and processing properties of chromogenic and fluorogenic materials; and (b) the computational power of the Belousov–Zhabotinsky reaction, which is an excellent model of the neural dynamics.