Computronium
A material that can be reprogrammed at the atomic scale to perform any computation, as efficiently as the laws of physics allow.
Millions of tiny computers arranged in 3D space.
Each computer only “talks” to its immediate neighbors.
Complex behaviors emerge from simple neighbor-to-neighbor interactions
Computronium (per What is Intelligence - What is Life)
A substance that computes with massive parallelism; the term was originally coined in the 1980s by physicist and computer scientist Norman Margolus to describe a hypothetical material optimized at the atomic or molecular level to perform computation as efficiently as the laws of physics allow, though I use it more broadly to describe the organized, computational state of matter characterizing life.