Large-Scale Cardiac Muscle Cell-Based Coupled Oscillator Network for Vertex Coloring Problem

Modern computers require an exponential increase in resources when solving computationally hard problems, motivating the need for an alternative computing platform to solve such problems in an energy-efficient manner. Vertex coloring, a nondeterministic polynomial time (NP-hard) combinatorial optimization problem, is one such problem. Herein, an experimental demonstration of using cardiac cell-based bio-oscillator network coupling dynamics to solve a vertex coloring problem in various scales of graphs using a simple cell patterning method to construct scalable and controlled cardiac cell networks is presented. Although there are limitations to using these cardiac cells as oscillators, such as their low frequency compared to complementary metal–oxide–semiconductor (CMOS) oscillators, that result in longer processing times, the accuracy in large graph instances, the significantly less amount of energy consumption, and the ease of fabrication and potential to extend this system to massively parallel 3D structures make the bio-oscillators a promising new platform for collective computing applications.