Abstract
Unconventional computing seeks to develop new means of acting on and interpreting the world. These emerge when new tools and computational substrates are built or discovered, or when existing artifacts are deployed in novel ways. Prior work designed sheets of vibrating particles to achieve mechanical polycomputation, wherein multiple logical operations were physically executed by the same parts at the same time. This works by exploiting the vibrational superposition of particles induced by external drives acting at multiple frequencies. In this paper, we introduce an idea called refractive computation, in which a sufficiently high density of polycomputed logic gates results in parallelized computations across driving frequencies. Parallelized logic gates are split across external drive frequencies in a single simulation, and emerge in the course of polycomputing sequential logic gates.