Modeling Bio-Mimicry

February 18, 2010

A team of Japanese and British researchers have come up with a biologically inspired mathematical model that may be useful in designing transportation systems.

Working under the assumption that biological networks might offer solutions to combinatorial optimization problems, the scientists investigated the potential of the fungus-like, single-cell organism called Physarum polycephalum.

Using oat flakes on a wet surface, the research team laid out a food pattern corresponding to locations of major cities and towns around Tokyo. They also used higher and lower amounts of light, which this organism skirts, to simulate difficult-to-traverse areas. They let the organism ooze its way around for more than 24 hours, looking for the distributed food supplies.

They claimed the mold "forms networks with comparable efficiency, fault tolerance, and cost to those of real-world infrastructure networks" (in this particular case matching the outlines of the Tokyo rail system).

The scientists bested the small-world creature in one domain. They found that redundancies maintain Tokyo's rail system, should one line go out. In the instance of the organism's network, however, the researchers discovered a 14±4% chance of one of the cities (oats) being cut off from the rest of the system (In their little world, where a house fly equals Godzilla, that’s a significant problem).

The so-called network developed "without centralized control and may represent a readily scalable solution for growing networks in general," reported the team.

The work is "a very interesting example of how biology can inspire new methods in technological design," said Melanie Mitchell (Portland State University, in Oregon). Their paper, however, "uses only one relatively simple example," she said. "It's not obvious that similar experiments would work as well for matching other transport networks."

The research team included Atsushi Tero, Seiji Takagi, Tetsu Saigusa, Kentaro Ito, Dan P. Bebber (Oxford University) Mark D. Fricker (Oxford), Kenji Yumiki, Ryo Kobayashi, and Toshiyuki Nakagaki (Hokkaido University). They laid out their algorithmic example of "bio-mimicry" in "Rules for Biologically Inspired Adaptive Network Design" (Science, January 22, 2010; pp. 439 - 442).

Researchers have investigated this organism's behavior before. In 2000, for example, a team led by mathematical biologist Nakagaki showed that P. polycephalum could find the shortest path through a maze to connect two food resources. That finding garnered Nakagaki an Ig Nobel prize.

Source: Science Now

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Start Date:

Thursday, February 18, 2010