Biomedical Engineering Reference
In-Depth Information
FIGURE 13.15 The Tokyo railway network simulated by the slime mold P. polycephalum . (a) and (b) together show how
the slime mold has formed food corridors between food sources following a route similar to the existing Tokyo railway
system (c). (d) shows the minimum spanning tree , i.e., the shortest graph that connects all nodes. Reprinted from Ref. [49]
with permission from Prof. T. Nakagaki and the American Association for the Advancement of Sciences.
the slime mold was about 14%. However, the
slime mold reached these results without having
global knowledge of the area. It only used local
rules for either reinforcing preferred routes or
removing redundant ones. This behavior in the
slime mold can be explained by a change of the
tube diameter depending on the flow rates of
the liquid in the tube, as illustrated in Figure 13.16 .
When a tube during growth reaches a food
source, the flow rate of liquid increases. This can
be formulated as a functional principle whereby
the capacity of a connection is either increased
or decreased depending on the amount of
traffic.
FIGURE 13.16 The basic principle in adapting size of food channels to the location with the highest need. The drawing
is based on the description in Ref. 49 .
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