1,580 research outputs found
Road planning with slime mould: If Physarum built motorways it would route M6/M74 through Newcastle
Plasmodium of Physarum polycephalum is a single cell visible by unaided eye.
During its foraging behaviour the cell spans spatially distributed sources of
nutrients with a protoplasmic network. Geometrical structure of the
protoplasmic networks allows the plasmodium to optimize transfer of nutrients
between remote parts of its body, to distributively sense its environment, and
make a decentralized decision about further routes of migration. We consider
the ten most populated urban areas in United Kingdom and study what would be an
optimal layout of transport links between these urban areas from the
"plasmodium's point of view". We represent geographical locations of urban
areas by oat flakes, inoculate the plasmodium in Greater London area and
analyse the plasmodium's foraging behaviour. We simulate the behaviour of the
plasmodium using a particle collective which responds to the environmental
conditions to construct and minimise transport networks. Results of our scoping
experiments show that during its colonization of the experimental space the
plasmodium forms a protoplasmic network isomorphic to a network of major
motorways except the motorway linking England with Scotland. We also imitate
the reaction of transport network to disastrous events and show how the
transport network can be reconfigured during natural or artificial cataclysms.
The results of the present research lay a basis for future science of
bio-inspired urban and road planning.Comment: Submitted November (2009
Towards heterotic computing with droplets in a fully automated droplet-maker platform
The control and prediction of complex chemical systems is a difficult problem due to the nature of the interactions, transformations and processes occurring. From self-assembly to catalysis and self-organization, complex chemical systems are often heterogeneous mixtures that at the most extreme exhibit system-level functions, such as those that could be observed in a living cell. In this paper, we outline an approach to understand and explore complex chemical systems using an automated droplet maker to control the composition, size and position of the droplets in a predefined chemical environment. By investigating the spatio-temporal dynamics of the droplets, the aim is to understand how to control system-level emergence of complex chemical behaviour and even view the system-level behaviour as a programmable entity capable of information processing. Herein, we explore how our automated droplet-maker platform could be viewed as a prototype chemical heterotic computer with some initial data and example problems that may be viewed as potential chemically embodied computations
Quantum Navigation and Ranking in Complex Networks
Complex networks are formal frameworks capturing the interdependencies
between the elements of large systems and databases. This formalism allows to
use network navigation methods to rank the importance that each constituent has
on the global organization of the system. A key example is Pagerank navigation
which is at the core of the most used search engine of the World Wide Web.
Inspired in this classical algorithm, we define a quantum navigation method
providing a unique ranking of the elements of a network. We analyze the
convergence of quantum navigation to the stationary rank of networks and show
that quantumness decreases the number of navigation steps before convergence.
In addition, we show that quantum navigation allows to solve degeneracies found
in classical ranks. By implementing the quantum algorithm in real networks, we
confirm these improvements and show that quantum coherence unveils new
hierarchical features about the global organization of complex systems.Comment: title changed, more real networks analyzed, version published in
scientific report
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