Prescriptive relational biology and bacterial chemotaxis.

Abstract The biological notion of adaptation (to surviving in a given environment) has a predictive and even prescriptive power in the special case of “positional adaptation”—in environments showing a non-uniform distribution of survival-effective factors. Resulting is a well-posed optimality problem which defines the necessary performance of locomotion-control systems. The simplest case (“soft” survival functional in space) is considered in some detail. The least complex solution (in terms of algorithm plus hardware plus periphery) already yielding an appreciable effect is derived in a self-consistent heuristic way. It is apparently identical with the blueprint of the locomotion-control system of certain bacteria. The optimization algorithm involved is the “local Bremermann algorithm”.

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