The role of noise in self-organized decision making by the true slime mold Physarum polycephalum.

ABSTRACT: Self-organized mechanisms are frequently encountered in nature and known to achieve flexible, adaptive control and decision-making. Noise plays a crucial role in such systems: It can enable a self-organized system to reliably adapt to short-term changes in the environment while maintaining a generally stable behavior. This is fundamental in biological systems because they must strike a delicate balance between stable and flexible behavior. In the present paper we analyse the role of noise in the decision-making of the true slime mold Physarum polycephalum, an important model species for the investigation of computational abilities in simple organisms. We propose a simple biological experiment to investigate the reaction of P. polycephalum to time-variant risk factors and present a stochast

SUBMITTER: Meyer B 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC5371312 | biostudies-literature | 2017

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature