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On Electrical Gates on Fungal Colony

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Fungal Machines

Part of the book series: Emergence, Complexity and Computation ((ECC,volume 47))

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Abstract

Mycelium networks are promising substrates for designing unconventional computing devices providing rich topologies and geometries where signals propagate and interact. Fulfilling our long-term objectives of prototyping electrical analog computers from living mycelium networks, including networks hybridised with nanoparticles, we explore the possibility of implementing Boolean logical gates based on electrical properties of fungal colonies. We converted a 3D image-data stack of Aspergillus niger fungal colony to an Euclidean graph and modelled the colony as resistive and capacitive (RC) networks, where electrical parameters of edges were functions of the edges’ lengths. We found that and, or and and-not gates are implementable in RC networks derived from the geometrical structure of the real fungal colony.

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Notes

  1. 1.

    The macro was developed by the Advanced Digital Microscopy Core Facility, IRB Barcelona, to process Z-stack data for blood vessel segmentation and network analysis, see details in adm.irbbarcelona.org/bioimage-analysis/image-j-fiji and biii.eu/blood-vessel-segmentation-and-network-analysis.

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Author information

Authors and Affiliations

  1. Centre for Engineering Research, University of Hertfordshire, Hatfield, UK

    Alexander E. Beasley

  2. Unconventional Computing Laboratory, UWE, Bristol, UK

    Alexander E. Beasley & Michail-Antisthenis Tsompanas

  3. The Centre for Information Technology and Architecture, Royal Danish Academy, Copenhagen, Denmark

    Phil Ayres

  4. Microbiology Department, University of Utrecht, Utrecht, The Netherlands

    Martin Tegelaar & Andrew Adamatzky

Authors
  1. Alexander E. Beasley
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  2. Phil Ayres
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  4. Michail-Antisthenis Tsompanas
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  5. Andrew Adamatzky
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Correspondence to Andrew Adamatzky .

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  1. Unconventional Computing Laboratory, University of the West of England, Bristol, UK

    Andrew Adamatzky

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Beasley, A.E., Ayres, P., Tegelaar, M., Tsompanas, MA., Adamatzky, A. (2023). On Electrical Gates on Fungal Colony. In: Adamatzky, A. (eds) Fungal Machines. Emergence, Complexity and Computation, vol 47. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-38336-6_20

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