  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.
