Natural Computing and Its Implementation with Optical Systems

Natural computing is an unconventional information processing scheme that utilizes various dynamics in nature, including natural substances and nature-inspired computing algorithms. In this article, we introduce maze exploration by natural substances and phenomena and describe our implementation of novel maze exploration by a two-dimensional optical bistable device. In addition, our amoeba-inspired algorithm to solve a combinatorial optimization problem is introduced, and its implementations in a network of nanophotonic quantum dots are described.