HW 2 - Biomimetic Design


Brian Mere
BMED 213-70
HW # 2

1. Select a device, material, or process of interest that involves some aspects of biomimetic design. You may choose an existing design or one that remains in the preliminary stages. Describe the need for this design and the specific function that is (or will be) addressed by the design.

The idea of P Systems helps try to help computations that, on classical computers, may take a possibly exponentially long time. Classical computers are quite good at especially doing any numerical calculations, but when it comes to solving problems that are more conditional, other computing systems are required. P systems can help solve problems like k-SAT, the k boolean satisfiability problem, by using the parallelism of the membrane-structure of the system, along with the exponential multiplication of membranes in the system, to expand its search exponentially [1]. You can view more about the process at [2], but the way it works is that:

  1. Describe one or more biological systems that exhibit properties that would benefit your design. For example, if you are interested in designing s system to pump water to the top of a building, you may want to cite a tree as an example of a biological system that performs a similar function.

The whole process mimics a similar processes in biology where cell membranes have channels (channel proteins) that allow or prevent carrier proteins, ATP, and so on traverse into the cell to be used [3]. In the same vein, the set of rules that are defined for the membrane for the P system allows certain information to traverse the walls of each membrane (or not traverse it). This is nice, because each membrane can "communicate" with each other and would likely develop specialized functions, similar to cells within other eukarya.

  1. Describe the method/materials/designs proposed to imitate the natural design of the biological system. What parts of the biological system will be reproduced and what parts will be replaced by other means?

The methods replicates the chemical processes that occur via cell membranes by having the programmer create rules, where the chemicals in question are written down as a string. These strings are then transformed into new strings based on these rules. In a sense, these allow the cell to have its own memory and functionality, as they evolve based on the input set of rules to have specialized functions via any emergent properties. Essentially, anything that we want to replicate we have to simulate via classical computing methods.

  1. Assess the technologies used in the design. Are there limitations to the design based on a lack of available technology? What advances in technology would improve the design? Or, does the design take full advantage of existing technologies with no lack of functionality or excess cost and complexity?

This was an older designed technology, and especially for those times, this method wouldn't really work. The problem here is that, despite the paper name for [1], you're still simulating a biological system on a classical computer. At some point, the amount of memory needed to store the states of an exponentially-growing rate of membranes will be too much for a classical system to handle. While something like a quantum computer could solve these issues (because we could store the state of a membrane within qubits), the limited number of qubits doesn't allow for the exponential growing of the number of membranes that Gheorghe was hoping for. At some point, we'd still be bottlenecked by the amount of information we need to store.

References

[1] P. Gheorghe, "P Systems with Active Membranes: Attacking NP Complete Problems", Inst. of Mathematics of the Romanian Academy, Bucursti, Romania May. 1999.

[2] P. Gheorghe, “Home,” Home - The P Systems Webpage, http://ppage.psystems.eu/ (accessed Apr. 15, 2024).

[3] L. M. Biga et al., “3.1 the cell membrane,” Anatomy Physiology, https://open.oregonstate.education/aandp/chapter/3-1-the-cell-membrane/ (accessed Apr. 15, 2024).