2015/11/24 by Jeff Jones, Jeff Dale Jones, Jones, Jeff Dale
Computer Science · Engineering · #Emerging Technologies (cs.ET) #FOS: Computer and information sciences #Slime Mold and Myxomycetes Research #cs.ET
paper · pdf · doi:10.48550/arxiv.1511.07651
2014 - Adaptive Materials, Devices and Systems Towards Unconventional Computing and Robotics: Modeling and Implementation, 26th-27th September, Rhodes, Greece
arxiv created 2015/11/24 · openalex publication_date 2015/11/24 · arxiv updated 2015/11/25 · openalex created_date 2025/10/10 · openalex updated_date 2026/07/28
Lateral Inhibition (LI) phenomena occur in a wide range of sensory modalities and are most famously described in the human visual system. In LI the activity of a stimulated neuron is itself excited and suppresses the activity of its local neighbours via inhibitory connections, increasing the contrast between spatial environmental stimuli. Simple or- ganisms, such as the single-celled slime mould Physarum polycephalum possess no neural tissue yet, despite this, are known to exhibit complex computational behaviour. Could simple organisms such as slime mould approximate LI without recourse to neural tissue? We describe a model whereby LI can emerge without explicit inhibitory wiring, using only bulk transport effects. We use a multi-agent virtual material model of slime mould to reproduce the characteristic contrast amplification response of LI using excitation via attractant stimuli. Restoration of baseline activ- ity occurs when the stimuli are removed. We also explore an opposite counterpart behaviour, Lateral Activation (LA), using repellent stimuli. These preliminary results suggest that simple organisms without neural tissue may approximate sensory contrast enhancement using alternative analogues of LI and suggests novel approaches towards generating collec- tive contrast enhancement in distributed computing and robotic devices.