How to Color a French Flag - Biologically Inspired Algorithms for Scale-Invariant Patterning

Bertie Ancona, Ayesha Bajwa, Nancy A. Lynch, Frederik Mallmann-Trenn

Abstract: In the French flag problem, initially uncolored cells on a grid must differentiate to become blue, white or red. The goal is for the cells to color the grid as a French flag, i.e., a three-colored triband, in a distributed manner. To solve a generalized version of the problem in a distributed computational setting, we consider two models: a biologically-inspired version that relies on morphogens (diffusing proteins acting as chemical signals) and a more abstract version based on reliable message passing between cellular agents.