Abstract

Experimental studies have shown that fungi use a natural program for searching the space available in micro-confined networks, e.g., mazes. This natural program, which comprises two subroutines, i.e., collision-induced branching and directional memory, has been shown to be efficient compared with the suppressing one, or both subroutines. The present contribution compares the performance of the fungal natural program against several standard space searching algorithms. It was found that the fungal natural algorithm consistently outperforms Depth-First-Search (DFS) algorithm, and although it is inferior to informed algorithms, such as A*, this under-performance does not increase importantly with the increase of the size of the maze. These findings encourage a systematic effort to harvest the natural space searching algorithms used by microorganisms, which, if efficient, can be reverse-engineered for graph and tree search strategies.

Highlights

  • Biological entities have evolved highly efficient strategies for space searching, which are essential to their survival[1]

  • We compared the performance of the natural program for space search used by fungi, as documented by previous experimental studies, against several standard space searching algorithms, both uninformed of the maze structure, i.e., Depth-First-Search (DFS) algorithm, and informed algorithms, such as A*, Best First Search, Jump Point Search and Dijkstra

  • It was found that the fungal natural algorithm consistently outperforms the DFS algorithm, and it is inferior to informed algorithms, such as A*, this under-performance does not increase importantly with the increase of the size of the maze

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Summary

Introduction

Biological entities have evolved highly efficient strategies for space searching, which are essential to their survival[1]. The bio-inspired algorithms are just “inspired” by, rather than “reverse-engineered” from, natural algorithms “developed” by biological entities It was observed[4,5] that fungi behave very differently in micro-confined spaces, and that they use specific programs for searching space available for growth. While different species present different variants of this fungal program, its framework is common and it consists of the interplay of two ‘sub-routines’: collision-induced branching, and directional memory. These studies demonstrated that the natural program comprising the two ‘sub-routines’ is markedly superior to variants where one of these is, or both are suppressed

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