Amoeba-Inspired Solution-Searching Algorithm and its Nanophotonics Implementation

Abstract

A single-celled amoeba (a plasmodial slime mold), which exhibits complex spatiotemporal oscillatory dynamics, has shown to be used to search for a solution to a combinatorial optimization problem. Photoexcitation transfer phenomena in a certain quantum-dot network mediated by optical near-field interactions generate stochastic spatiotemporal dynamics. Here we review a novel computing architecture that exploits the spatiotemporal dynamics in the quantum-dot network to solve the satisfiability problem, which is an NP-complete problem.