Mining logical circuits in fungi

TL;DR

This paper demonstrates that living fungal materials, specifically mycelium composites, can implement complex Boolean logic circuits, enabling their use as adaptive, sensing, and computing materials for unconventional computing applications.

Contribution

It introduces experimental prototypes of Boolean functions implemented in fungal materials, showing their capability to perform complex computations including universal computation.

Findings

Fungal materials can realize all classes of cellular automata functions.

Mycelium composites can implement computationally universal functions.

Experimental prototypes demonstrate practical implementation of logical circuits in fungi.

Abstract

Living substrates are capable for nontrivial mappings of electrical signals due to the substrate nonlinear electrical characteristics. This property can be used to realise Boolean functions. Input logical values are represented by amplitude or frequency of electrical stimuli. Output logical values are decoded from electrical responses of living substrates. We demonstrate how logical circuits can be implemented in mycelium bound composites. The mycelium bound composites (fungal materials) are getting growing recognition as building, packaging, decoration and clothing materials. Presently the fungal materials are passive. To make the fungal materials adaptive, i.e. sensing and computing, we should embed logical circuits into them. We demonstrate experimental laboratory prototypes of many-input Boolean functions implemented in fungal materials from oyster fungi \emph{P. ostreatus}. We characterise complexity of the functions discovered via complexity of the space-time configurations of one-dimensional cellular automata governed by the functions. We show that the mycelium bound composites can implement representative functions from all classes of cellular automata complexity including the computationally universal. The results presented will make an impact in the field of unconventional computing, experimental demonstration of purposeful computing with fungi, and in the field of intelligent materials, as the prototypes of computing mycelium bound composites.