On electrical gates on fungal colony

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.

Keywords: Boolean gates; Mycelium network; Unconventional computing.