Purkinje fibres carry one signal to many muscle cells so the ventricles contract together; Purkinje cells in the cerebellum integrate thousands of inputs into one output. PURKINJE groups the studies in which a self-driving laboratory has more than one decider: a fast reflex at the instrument beside the planner, a database that prepares for its users, a network of units that each pull the next run, and teams whose structure shapes what they find.
QedSDL: a reflex at the instrument¶
∎ end of proof. Every Purkinje fibre ends at a muscle cell that acts on the spot; the reflex at the instrument is where a decision ends without waiting for the planner.
How the fruit fly connectome can help autonomous materials discovery
Models wired from the fruit fly’s mushroom body and ventral nerve cord take decisions too fast for the planner: stop a failing selenization anneal, flag the wrong flake, end an irradiation at a set vacancy density. A stop decided at the furnace lost 0.15 flakes of 30 against 10.7 for a planner that needed 60 s per turn, and ran in 0.30 ms on a Raspberry Pi 5.
Use for a campaign: put a low-cost reflex layer under the planner, not in place of it.
HatSDL: a database that reads the plan¶
x̂ hat. The heart prepares each beat before it comes; the database prepares for each workload from the plan, an estimate rather than a reaction.
A database that reads the laboratory network’s plan, instrument schedule and calendar had its indexes ready 0.3 s after each laboratory event, against about 11 s when learning from history, and kept new user groups on target with 29% less index space.
Use for a campaign: treat the network’s announced work as the forecast of what the database will be asked.
In preparation¶
∧ WedgedSDL (pull scheduling). The bundle of His splits like a wedge into left and right branches; each unit of the network pulls the next run at the fidelity it offers.
∪ CupSDL (team structure). Fibres gather into bundles before they branch; teams gather into structures, learned as a hypergraph.
A further study, on dividing a campaign’s outcome among its members, meetings and borrowed knowledge, belongs to PECTINATE and is under double-blind review.
Code and data¶
Each published article has a public repository under Sparks