From healing wounds to maintaining homeostasis in cyclically loaded tissue, living systems have a phenomenal ability to sense, store, and respond to mechanical stimuli. Broadly speaking, there is significant interest in designing engineered systems to recapitulate this incredible functionality. In engineered systems, we have seen significant recent computationally driven advances in sensing and control. And, there has been a growing interest - inspired in part by the incredible distributed and emergent functionality observed in the natural world - in exploring the ability of engineered systems to perform computation through mechanisms that are fundamentally driven by physical laws. In this work, we focus on a small segment of this broad and evolving field: locality sensitive hashing via mechanical behavior. Specifically, we will address the question: can mechanical information (i.e., loads) be transformed by mechanical systems (i.e., converted into sensor readouts) such that the mechanical system meets the requirements for a locality sensitive hash function? Overall, we not only find that mechanical systems are able to perform this function, but also that different mechanical systems vary widely in their efficacy at this task. Looking forward, we view this work as a starting point for significant future investigation into the design and optimization of mechanical systems for conveying mechanical information for downstream computing.

翻译：从伤口愈合到循环加载组织中稳态的维持，生命系统具有感知、存储和响应力学刺激的非凡能力。广义而言，设计工程系统以重现这种令人难以置信的功能具有重大意义。在工程系统中，我们见证了近年来由计算驱动的传感与控制领域取得的显著进展。同时，受自然界中观察到的分布式涌现功能的启发，人们日益关注探索工程系统通过本质上由物理定律驱动的机制执行计算的能力。本研究聚焦于这一广阔且不断发展的领域中的一个具体方向：通过力学行为实现的局部敏感哈希。具体而言，我们将探讨以下问题：力学信息（即载荷）能否被力学系统转换（即转化为传感器读数），从而使该力学系统满足局部敏感哈希函数的要求？总体而言，我们不仅发现力学系统能够实现该功能，而且不同力学系统在此任务上的效能存在显著差异。展望未来，本研究将作为重要起点，推动后续针对力学系统设计优化的深入研究，以实现力学信息向下游计算的传递。