Abstract
Physarum polycephalum is a slime mold that is apparently able to solve shortest path problems. A mathematical model for the slime’s behavior in the form of a coupled system of differential equations was proposed by Tero, Kobayashi and Nakagaki [TKN07]. We prove that a discretization of the model (Euler integration) computes a (1 + ε)-approximation of the shortest path in O( m L (logn + logL)/ε 3) iterations, with arithmetic on numbers of O(log(nL/ε)) bits; here, n and m are the number of nodes and edges of the graph, respectively, and L is the largest length of an edge. We also obtain two results for a directed Physarum model proposed by Ito et al. [IJNT11]: convergence in the general, nonuniform case and convergence and complexity bounds for the discretization of the uniform case.
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Becchetti, L., Bonifaci, V., Dirnberger, M., Karrenbauer, A., Mehlhorn, K. (2013). Physarum Can Compute Shortest Paths: Convergence Proofs and Complexity Bounds. In: Fomin, F.V., Freivalds, R., Kwiatkowska, M., Peleg, D. (eds) Automata, Languages, and Programming. ICALP 2013. Lecture Notes in Computer Science, vol 7966. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-39212-2_42
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-39212-2_42
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