Stigmergic electronic gates and networks

Abstract

Stigmergy is a communication method based on changing the surrounding environment according to reference feedbacks. It is typical within animal colonies that are able to process even complex information by releasing signals into the environment, which are subsequently received and processed by other elements of the colony. For example, ants searching for food leave traces of a pheromone, like Hansel and Gretel’s breadcrumbs, along the way. When food is found, they return to the anthill reinforcing this pheromone trace as a signal and reminder to all the others. Similar techniques are used in routing software even if stigmergic hardware might be even more efficient, fast, and energy saving. Recently, a stigmergic photonic gate based on soliton waveguides has been proposed; this particular stigmergic hardware can switch the output ratio of the channels as a result of optical feedback. Based on these results, in this study, we analyze stigmergic electronic gates that can be addressed through external feedback, as the photonic ones do. We show that the nonlinear response of such gates must be based on quadratic saturating conductances driven by feedback signals. For this purpose, networks of stigmergic gates require two parallel and communicating current circuits: one to transmit information, and another for feedback signals to control the gate switching. We also show that by increasing the number of terminals per single gate, from 2 × 2 to 3 × 3 or higher, the overall power consumption can be reduced by a few orders of magnitude.