Simulating self-organization with the digital hormone model

摘要

Inspired by the recent biological findings that many complex biological patterns are results of self-organization of homogeneous cells regulated by hormones, this paper presents the Digital Hormone Model (DHM) as a new computational model for self-organization. The model integrates advantages from many existing computational models of self-organization and produces results that match and predict the actual findings in the biological experiments of feather bud formation among uniform skin cells. To the best of our knowledge, these results are perhaps the first of its kind in the history of modeling self-organization. Furthermore, the new modeling techniques used in this model may lead more breakthroughs in simulating large scale and complex self-organization phenomena in nature.