Towards slime mould electrical logic gates with optical coupling

TL;DR

This paper demonstrates how slime mould can be used to create fault-tolerant, resettable logical gates with electrical inputs and outputs, utilizing optical coupling to advance biological computing integration.

Contribution

It introduces a novel method of constructing logical gates using slime mould's phototactic responses and optical coupling, integrating living biological substrates with electronic hardware.

Findings

Successfully constructed NOT and NAND gates with slime mould

Gates exhibit fault tolerance and reset capability

Demonstrated potential for biological-electronic hardware integration

Abstract

Physarum polycephalum is a macroscopic single celled plasmodial slime mould. We employ plasmodial phototactic responses to construct laboratory prototypes of NOT and NAND logical gates with electrical inputs/outputs and optical coupling; 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 advance our understanding of how biological computing substrates may be manipulated to implement logical operations and demonstrate the feasibility of integrating living substrates into silicon hardware.