A paper co-authored by ELSI Research Scientist Masashi Aono and ELSI Affiliated Scientist Masahiko Hara will appear in Scientific Reports (an online scientific journal of Nature Publishing Group).

Key points:
- Nanostructures, which select the optimal one from a huge number of options at an extremely high speed, were developed.
- The mechanism of the nanostructure-based computing system was inspired by a primitive amoeboid organism, the true slime mold Physarum, which makes optimal decisions autonomously, adapting to environmental conditions.
- The computing mechanism will provide clues to understanding how prebiotic chemical substances selected a path to proto-biological systems.

Abstract: Inspired by the computing mechanism of the amoeboid organism, we demonstrated that a novel computing system for highly efficient decision making can be implemented using nanoscale photoexcitation transfer dynamics in quantum dots.

This work was conducted by Masahiko Hara (Affiliated Scientist at ELSI), Song-Ju Kim (Research Scientist at WPI Center for Materials Nanoarchitectonics [Mana], National Institute for Materials Science [NIMS], Japan), and Masashi Aono (Research Scientist at ELSI), who formerly belonged to Flucto-Order Functions Research Team, RIKEN-HYU Collaboration Research Center, RIKEN Advanced Science Institute, Japan, in collaboration with Makoto Naruse, a Senior Researcher at the National Institute of Technology (NICT), Japan and Motoichi Ohtsu, a Professor at School of Engineering and Nanophotonics Research Center, the University of Tokyo, Japan.

Paper Title: Decision Maker Based on Nanoscale Photo-Excitation Transfer, Scientific Reports, 3:2370

Authors: Song-Ju Kim, Makoto Naruse, Masashi Aono, Motoichi Ohtsu, Masahiko Hara

DOI: 10.1038/srep02370

More details (Press Release from RIKEN; Sorry, Japanese version only)

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