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Articles

Slime mould foraging behaviour as optically coupled logical operations

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Pages 305-313 | Received 11 Oct 2014, Accepted 27 Nov 2014, Published online: 12 Jan 2015
 

Abstract

Physarum polycephalum is a macroscopic plasmodial slime mould whose apparently ‘intelligent’ behaviour patterns may be interpreted as computation. We employ plasmodial phototactic responses to construct laboratory prototypes of NOT and NAND logical gates with electrical inputs/outputs and optical coupling in which the slime mould plays dual roles of computing device and electrical conductor. Slime mould logical gates are fault tolerant and resettable. The results presented here demonstrate the malleability and resilience of biological systems and highlight how the innate behaviour patterns of living substrates may be used to implement useful computation.

Additional information

Funding

The authors gratefully acknowledge the EU Commission seventh Framework Program. The authors declare no conflict of interest.

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