Egbert, Matthew, Yan Kolezhitskiy, and Nathaniel Virgo. “Steering the Growth of Adaptive Self-Preserving Dissipative Structures.” In ALIFE 2019: The 2019 Conference on Artificial Life , pp. 255-262. MIT Press, 2019.
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In the 1950s, the famous cyberneticists Gordon Pask and Stafford Beer conducted a series of remarkable electrochemical deposition experiments. By applying an electric potential across electrodes submerged in an acidic solution of ferrous sulfate, they could bias the growth of electrochemical deposition so as to form functional structures including sensory structures capable of distinguishing between different sounds. Unfortunately, the details of their apparatus and methods are unavailable. As a consequence, their experiment has not been replicated, and the precise mechanisms underlying their results remain unknown. As preliminary steps toward recreating their remarkable results, this paper presents a new computational model that simulates the growth and decay of dendritic structures similar to those investigated by Beer & Pask. We use this model to demonstrate a plausible mechanism through which an electrochemical system of this kind could respond to a reinforcement signal. More specifically, we investigate three strategies for varying the applied electrical current so as to guide the formation of structures into target forms. Each presented strategy succeeds at influencing the growth of the structure, with the most successful strategy involving a ‘constant-current’ feedback mechanism combined with an externally driven oscillation. In the discussion, we compare the adaptation of these structures with various biological adaptive processes, including evolution and metabolism-based adaptive behaviour.