Towards slime mould electrical logic gates with optical coupling

Abstract

Physarum polycephalum is a macroscopic single celled plasmodial slime mould. We employ plasmodial phototactic responses to construct laboratory prototypes of NOT and NAND logical gates with electrical inputs/outputs and optical coupling; the slime mould plays dual roles of computing device and electrical conductor. Slime mould logical gates are fault tolerant and resettable. The results presented here advance our understanding of how biological computing substrates may be manipulated to implement logical operations and demonstrate the feasibility of integrating living substrates into silicon hardware.