Morphologically tunable mycelium chips for physical reservoir computing
Orkan Telhan, Jake Winiski, Damen Schaak, Michael Siegel, Neale Petrillo, Eben Bayer · 2026
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Description
Orkan Telhan leads a six-author team introducing a 2026 computing material grown from fungal mycelium. The chips infuse mycelium, the root-like network of fungi, with a conductive polymer called PEDOT:PSS, forming resistors, capacitors, and nonlinear elements whose shapes can be tuned during growth. The work uses physical reservoir computing, where a physical system turns time-varying inputs into rich internal patterns and only a simple readout layer needs training.
Grown hyphal networks handled a standard sequence task called NARMA-10, and the team measured memory capacity, fading-memory behaviour, and variation between chips. Growth complexity changed how charge moved through the material and how much it remembered. The authors stress practical advantages: the non-living chips are cheap, biodegradable, and compatible with mushroom farming methods, with yields above three million chips per growth cycle.
Catalog record
| CREATOR | Orkan Telhan, Jake Winiski, Damen Schaak, Michael Siegel, Neale Petrillo, Eben Bayer |
|---|---|
| YEAR | 2026 |
| COLLECTION | PAPERS |
| FORMAT | TXT |
| FILE SIZE | 49874 |
| LICENSE | https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0 |
| RIGHTS | CC BY |
| SOURCE | Europe PMC |