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high. Moreover, the reaction cell must be carefully protected from ambient light
radiation.
Moreover, the complexity of the problem necessitated the development of a
reaction-diffusion medium with a structure optimal for this problem.
A two-level reaction-diffusion system was formed. The catalyst in this system is
immobilized on the surface of a solid substrate (a thin layer of silica gel), and all
other reaction components are in a liquid phase and the reaction takes place at the
phase boundary. In this case, the reaction of the Belousov-Zhabotinsky type occurs
at the boundary between the liquid phase and silica gel, thus significantly improving
the quality of the image of the maze (sharpness, resolution, etc.). Immobilization of
the catalyst protected the image from distortions that could be caused by random
external influences (shock, vibration, etc.).
Let us make some remarks concerning the effectiveness of the proposed method.
When the wave passes through a branch point, some part of the maze not
connected to its exit is discarded and does not participate in the further steps of
the procedure. The more complex the maze, the larger parts of it are cut off in the
process of finding the shortest path. Therefore, a remarkable property of the
proposed method is the increase of its efficiency as the maze becomes more
complex.
The step-by-step procedure greatly increases the time required for finding the
shortest path in the maze. The effectiveness of the procedure depends on the
operating speed of the reaction-diffusion medium and the number of turning points
in the maze. Nevertheless, it turns out to be higher than the efficiency of the
procedure that uses trigger waves. The time required for processing a maze of an
average complexity is approximately 5 min, with the duration of one cycle of the
medium about 40 s. This time is an order of magnitude smaller than that of the
procedure using trigger waves.
An important feature of the proposed method is also the fact that the time
required to determine the shortest path depends linearly on the number of branch
points of the maze.
5.4 A System of Interconnected Reaction-Diffusion
Reactors: Pattern Recognition Devices
In recent decades most of the experimental and theoretical studies of reaction-
diffusion systems have been devoted to the complex processes occurring in con-
tinuous homogeneous media. Considerably more complex dynamics corresponds to
a set of interrelated reaction-diffusion subsystems operating in a general case, in
different dynamic regimes.
Let us assume that the system is built from simple chemical fragments (sub-
systems) with full mixing, each of which described by the one-dimensional kinetic
equation:
