Two results on slime mold computations

We present two results on slime mold computations. In wet-lab experiments by Nakagaki et al. (2000) [1] the slime mold Physarum polycephalum demonstrated its ability to solve shortest path problems. Biologists proposed a mathematical model, a system of differential equations, for the slime's adaption process (Tero et al., 2007) [3]. It was shown that the process convergences to the shortest path (Bonifaci et al., 2012) [5] for all graphs. We show that the dynamics actually converges for a much wider class of problems, namely undirected linear programs with a non-negative cost vector. Combinatorial optimization researchers took the dynamics describing slime behavior as an inspiration for an optimization method and showed that its discretization can e-approximately solve linear programs with positive cost vector (Straszak and Vishnoi, 2016) [14]. Their analysis requires a feasible starting point, a step size depending linearly on epsilon, and a number of steps with quartic dependence on opt/(epsilon Phi), where Phi is the difference between the smallest cost of a non-optimal basic feasible solution and the optimal cost (opt). We give a refined analysis showing that the dynamics initialized with any strongly dominating point converges to the set of optimal solutions. Moreover, we strengthen the convergence rate bounds and prove that the step size is independent of epsilon, and the number of steps depends logarithmically on 1/epsilon and quadratically on opt/Phi. (C) 2018 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.