In 1974 in an MIT conference the famed Richard Feynman surprised his audience with his talk about computational models of physics, giving weight to the previously esoteric idea that our material world is essentially a computer. More recently the idea of assembling molecular systems as computing machine was boosted with (1) the advent of nanotechnology, and (2) the looming limits of miniaturization of silicon chips. Bio-inspired computer scientists have noted that nature is self organizing, self repairing, and self-replicating, and most importantly, evolving -- everything that integrated transistor circuits are not. And hence the race is on, to harness chemical phenomena as a computing machine. There are numerous models for chemical bit representation, for permanent as well as volatile storage. There are quite a few methods to use chemical reactivity as a predictable algorithm, and a great deal of theoretical work has been done with respect to asynchronicity and handling of complexity - the natural way.

Chemical reaction-diffusion media represent information effective processing. Recent work has shown that it can be used for image processing, finding the shortest paths in a maze and solving various problems of high computational complexity.

In the words of Peter Dittrich writing the chapter "Chemical Computing" in the book "Unconventional Programming Paradigms", Springer 2005: All information processing systems found in living organisms are based on chemical processes. Harnessing the power of chemistry for computing might lead to a new unifying paradigm coping with the rapidly increasing complexity and autonomy of computational systems. Chemical computing refers to computing with real molecules as well as to programming electronic devices using principles taken from chemistry.

A few practical applications appear to be very close at hand. One group is pushing chemical date stamps to create an "unpeelable" label of manufacturing data on polymers, gels, and composites. Certain electrochemical reactions may reflect cryptographic one-way functions.

D&G Sciences has recently developed a ChIP innovation database to help us appraise chemical computing innovation projects, (warning: some are really long term, and you don't want to get stuck with a loser...). It would appear that any major chemical company should be alert to this field. It can turn from esoterica to mainstay almost overnight. Let's together keep tabs on it the day before.