Towards implementation of cellular automata in Microbial Fuel Cells
Towards implementation of cellular automata in Microbial Fuel Cells
The Microbial Fuel Cell (MFC) is a bio-electrochemical transducer converting waste products into electricity using microbial communities. Cellular Automaton (CA) is a uniform array of finite-state machines that update their states in discrete time depending on states of their closest neighbors by the same rule. Arrays of MFCs could, in principle, act as massive-parallel computing devices with local connectivity between elementary processors. We provide a theoretical design of such a parallel processor by implementing CA in MFCs. We have chosen Conway’s Game of Life as the ‘benchmark’ CA because this is the most popular CA which also exhibits an enormously rich spectrum of patterns. Each cell of the Game of Life CA is realized using two MFCs. The MFCs are linked electrically and hydraulically. The model is verified via simulation of an electrical circuit demonstrating equivalent behaviours. The design is a first step towards future implementations of fully autonomous biological computing devices with massive parallelism. The energy independence of such devices counteracts their somewhat slow transitions—compared to silicon circuitry—between the different states during computation.
Tsompanas, Michail-Antisthenis I.
97fe4244-26a9-434b-a820-95c515ec536a
Adamatzky, Andrew
0e283fac-b264-41ea-81c8-22f01e9be8b3
Sirakoulis, Georgios Ch.
5357e852-11c5-4878-a80c-124038f246ba
Greenman, John
eb3d9b82-7cac-4442-9301-f34884ae4a16
Ieropoulos, Ioannis
6c580270-3e08-430a-9f49-7fbe869daf13
12 May 2017
Tsompanas, Michail-Antisthenis I.
97fe4244-26a9-434b-a820-95c515ec536a
Adamatzky, Andrew
0e283fac-b264-41ea-81c8-22f01e9be8b3
Sirakoulis, Georgios Ch.
5357e852-11c5-4878-a80c-124038f246ba
Greenman, John
eb3d9b82-7cac-4442-9301-f34884ae4a16
Ieropoulos, Ioannis
6c580270-3e08-430a-9f49-7fbe869daf13
Tsompanas, Michail-Antisthenis I., Adamatzky, Andrew, Sirakoulis, Georgios Ch., Greenman, John and Ieropoulos, Ioannis
(2017)
Towards implementation of cellular automata in Microbial Fuel Cells.
PLoS ONE, 12 (5), [e0177528].
(doi:10.1371/journal.pone.0177528).
Abstract
The Microbial Fuel Cell (MFC) is a bio-electrochemical transducer converting waste products into electricity using microbial communities. Cellular Automaton (CA) is a uniform array of finite-state machines that update their states in discrete time depending on states of their closest neighbors by the same rule. Arrays of MFCs could, in principle, act as massive-parallel computing devices with local connectivity between elementary processors. We provide a theoretical design of such a parallel processor by implementing CA in MFCs. We have chosen Conway’s Game of Life as the ‘benchmark’ CA because this is the most popular CA which also exhibits an enormously rich spectrum of patterns. Each cell of the Game of Life CA is realized using two MFCs. The MFCs are linked electrically and hydraulically. The model is verified via simulation of an electrical circuit demonstrating equivalent behaviours. The design is a first step towards future implementations of fully autonomous biological computing devices with massive parallelism. The energy independence of such devices counteracts their somewhat slow transitions—compared to silicon circuitry—between the different states during computation.
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Published date: 12 May 2017
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Local EPrints ID: 454050
URI: http://eprints.soton.ac.uk/id/eprint/454050
ISSN: 1932-6203
PURE UUID: fda1abd4-0482-4ace-8ea0-c1bcddcdbb5a
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Date deposited: 27 Jan 2022 19:20
Last modified: 17 Mar 2024 04:10
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Author:
Michail-Antisthenis I. Tsompanas
Author:
Andrew Adamatzky
Author:
Georgios Ch. Sirakoulis
Author:
John Greenman
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