Rotor-routing is a procedure for routing tokens through a network that can
implement certain kinds of computation. These computations are inherently
asynchronous (the order in which tokens are routed makes no difference) and
distributed (information is spread throughout the system). It is also possible
to efficiently check that a computation has been carried out correctly in less
time than the computation itself required, provided one has a certificate that
can itself be computed by the rotor-router network. Rotor-router networks can
be viewed as both discrete analogues of continuous linear systems and
deterministic analogues of stochastic processes.Comment: To appear in Chaos Special Focus Issue on Intrinsic and Designed
Computatio