Nubots

Informal Description of the Model

The Nubot model was developed to capture some of the dynamics present in living biological systems. Particularly, the goal was to capture, among other things, the exponential growth that occurs in the human zygote, wherein a small number of cells with the same set of instructions can differentiate into the roughly \(10^{14}\) cells which make up a human. The model consists of a number of individual nubots which sit on the vertices of a triangular grid. Each nubot, depending on the configuration of its neighbors can perform a number of transitions which consist of attaching to a neighbor, detaching from a neighbor, creating a new neighbor, removing a neighbor, or moving to an adjacent position.