Information operations with multiple pulses on an excitable field

Recently, we proposed a novel strategy for information operations on an excitable field, where, by adopting a suitable geometry for the excitable field, time-sequential input was processed with logical operations, co-incidence detection and real-time memorization. The present paper describes the advancement of this strategy for computation with multiple excitable pulses. We show a spatial arrangement for detecting the interval between successive pulses; in other words, the output pulse is generated only where the time-difference between input pulses falls within a suitable range. We also show some examples of multiple-valued operations of comparison and subtraction of the input strength, where the pulse number scales with the input strength. (C) 2002 Elsevier Science Ltd. All rights reserved.