The open field of computing: every way to compute, and how old it is.
Von Neumann's architecture (fetch, compute, store, repeat) is one idea among dozens, and not the most efficient. Beneath it is a whole field: numbers that make the multiplier vanish, memory that computes where it sits, physics that samples for free, light that multiplies at no cost, matter that solves a problem by settling into its lowest energy. This atlas surveys them, from the orbital gigawatt datacenter down to the sub-microwatt microcontroller. The striking thing is the dates. Balanced ternary shipped in the Setun computer in 1958. The memristor was predicted in 1971. The Ising model is 1925; cellular automata, the 1940s; reversible computing, 1961. These are not moats, they are deep, published prior art, an open commons anyone can build on. Which reframes the question: the future of computing is not the discovery of one new method, every method has already been thought of and tried. It is the convergence of the open ones into a single machine that spends energy only where physics demands it.
The map above places every way to compute in time. This one stacks them by what they physically do, which is the axis that decides what a machine costs to run.
Every node is a real method with a real history; the year is when its prior art begins. Read the map left-to-right by scale (a batteryless microcontroller running on ambient energy, out to a gigawatt solar datacenter in orbit) and top-to-bottom by paradigm. Filter by family; click any method for its principle, its energy or math advantage, and the century-deep lineage it rests on. We go deep on two of these, ternary for the deterministic path and thermodynamic for the stochastic, because their convergence is the edge stack.
In the field · the map's edges are moving fastest. At the largest scale, orbital datacenters left slideware behind, Starcloud trained a model in orbit in December 2025, and Google's Project Suncatcher aims solar-powered TPU satellites at 2027. At the smallest, energy-harvesting microcontrollers compute with no battery at all. In between, every unconventional paradigm, in-memory and memristive, neuromorphic, photonic, thermodynamic: is closing on practicality at once. The Institute's position is the plain one the dates imply: none of this is anyone's private future. It is an open commons, and the work is to converge it well.
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A map, not a bet: every way to compute, with how old each one really is. The correction it makes is about age. Several of the newest-sounding paradigms are older than the transistor, and once you know that, a demonstration stops being evidence of a new idea and starts being evidence about what finally became affordable.
One of eight, and only one of them is physics. How we read a frontier →