Bacterial colony: Information processing and computational behavior

A bacterium presents rudimentary, though powerful, cognitive functions, such as sensing the environment, processing information and contextual interpretation. When part of a colony, bacteria show collective memory, distributed information storage and processing, collective decision making abilities, cooperation and competition, various communication methods and learning at different levels. These features and capabilities allow us to view bacteria colonies as complex adaptive systems, from which much inspiration can be taken to the design of bioinspired tools and algorithms for problem solving and the modeling of biological phenomena. Despite some effort has been taken in this direction, emphasizing applications in optimization, the present paper brings a discussion of bacteria as useful information processing systems under an intelligent agent framework. The main benefits of this discussion, thus, are the presentation of an intelligent agent-based perspective of bacteria, the stress of the main communication skills and mechanisms of bacteria, and a structured discussion of their main information processing and learning. Our hope is that this paper paves the conceptual ground for the design of novel bacteria inspired algorithms with applications over several areas, from the mining of large databases, to the design of sophisticated decision-making mechanisms for collective robotics.