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Slime Mold Could Lead To Better Tech
FiReaNGeL writes to tell us that recent observation of slime mold could eventually lead the way to improved tech like better computer and communications networks. "This revelation comes after a team of Japanese and British researchers observed that the slime mold connected itself to scattered food sources in a design that was nearly identical to Tokyo's rail system. Atsushi Tero from Hokkaido University in Japan, along with colleagues elsewhere in Japan and the United Kingdom, placed oat flakes on a wet surface in locations that corresponded to the cities surrounding Tokyo, and allowed the Physarum polycephalum mold to grow outwards from the center. They watched the slime mold self-organize, spread out, and form a network that was comparable in efficiency, reliability, and cost to the real-world infrastructure of Tokyo's train network."
Were they high during this experiment?
I don't know.
I'm still not going to ride a slime mold to work.
But after adding the oat flakes they pissed all over the experiment. This time the mold organized itself just like the New York subway system.
Why not just study the rail system then. Sounds like they got it done right?
How much does the Tokyo Rail System cost, anyhow?
It's a sad day when our brightest computer scientists cannot invent better algorithms than slimy lowlife.
They watched the slime mold self-organize, spread out, and form a network that was comparable in efficiency, reliability, and cost to the real-world infrastructure of Tokyo's train network."
If you put it on a grilled cheese sandwich, will it organize itself into an image of the Virgin Mary?
American Third Position
Finally, a real choice!
Wake me up when it can complete and environmental impact assessment, defeat a coalition of concerned propertyholders suing because they don't want your "electrosmog" causing cancer, defeat a slimy local developer who really wants a route changed to improve the value of his land holdings, and then cajole the low-bidding contractor into actually building the network properly....
I am, of course, mostly joking, natural systems(ants are the other one that gets mentioned a lot) have developed some quite efficient approaches to various problems. If a problem can be solved by a large number of rounds of iterative adjustment, evolution has probably solved it good and hard somewhere. That said, though, it would be a mistake to overestimate the value of having an efficient solution on your drawing board. You cannot build an efficient system without one; but it is very easy to build a downright pathological system even with one.
Since mold and slime are already there...
To think. After all these years, Fred Physarum is finally getting the recognition he deserves.
Actio personalis moritur cum persona. (Dead men don't sue)
the proper conclusion is that japanese transportation engineers are no smarter than slime molds
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
One day my dog can trade in the market, generate enough income to pay for its dog food and let me retire.
Fuck systemd. Fuck Redhat. Fuck Soylent, too. Wait, scratch the last one.
I knew there was a reason I was growing so much of it in my fridge...
Seven puppies were harmed during the making of this post.
Maybe now they'll find an efficient solution to the Salesman problem.
The simple truth is that interstellar distances will not fit into the human imagination
- Douglas Adams
I, for one, welcome our new slime overlords!
A slime mold killed my kitten.
@
natural systems(ants are the other one that gets mentioned a lot) have developed some quite efficient approaches to various problems.
Do they have a good solution for lawyers? I ask because we were talking about slime molds...
HA! I just wasted some of your bandwidth with a frivolous sig!
In college 1 of my professors told us a story... A complex built several large buildings all on the same block. They didn't install any sidewalks or walkways just grass. They waited 1 year and looked at the grass. They built sidewalks wherever there was a path in the grass. The bigger the path the bigger the sidewalk. I thought it was an interesting idea. So many times I look back and try to wonder what the engineer/designer was thinking.
My, what a yummy slime mold!
Wow! That is some pretty expensive slime-mold, since the Tokyo train network probably cost billions. I wonder how the slime-mold was able to raise that much money.
we will have slime mold designing our network infrastructure,,, will they understand routing ? will the slime mold have a ccna ou mcse degree ? must be a slime mold from beyond .... evillllllll
The next study will involve rust monsters and gelatinous cubes.
Now the Japanese can look forward to slime molds doing their urban renewal instead of Godzilla or Mothra!
Starships were meant to fly, Hands up and touch the sky - Nicky Minaj
Anyone who's seen old-school anime like Akira knows that Japan is doomed to being consumed by an ever-growing blob of indeterminate origin.
We now know it will start in the subways...
When information is power, privacy is freedom.
You know you want to
I thought for a second we might finally have a really good way to model the complex, ever-deepening relationship that's grown up between North American politicians and their corporate masters. Then I realized there's some things even a slime mold won't do.
I've calculated my velocity with such exquisite precision that I have no idea where I am.
natural systems(ants are the other one that gets mentioned a lot) have developed some quite efficient approaches to various problems.
Do they have a good solution for lawyers? I ask because we were talking about slime molds...
Why do you suppose the sea has a bottom?
If this is the type of discussion that usually occurs at this particular web-sight, then I'm through here.
I sincerely hope that this wasn't someone's doctorate thesis.
There are too many such "learned" individuals out there who are incapable original thought. I wonder if this has always been the case...
It's just a fractal, people.
Set your phasers on "funky"!
the slime mold [...] was comparable in efficiency, reliability, and cost to the real-world infrastructure of Tokyo's train network.
That means: both have been made by intelligent designers!
Giant slime mold uses Tokyo Railway system to destroy Tokyo ...
Story at 11
Just curious...
... saying that no, the slime mold looked more like the Virgin Mary. Pilgrims from around the world are planning on heading to the site in the weeks ahead to pay their respects before it starts to more closely resemble Elvis or the Three Stooges.
"Uh, yes, I basically seed my coffee cup, and the pattern of the growths provides the data index for least wasted steps algorithms."
if this is supposed to be a new economy, how come they still want my old fashioned money?
The traveling salesman problem is NP-complete, slime molds or not. Under some conditions it can be approximated efficiently, but slime molds are not about to solve the travelling salesman problem in sub-exponential time. In any case, using a computer is much faster than waiting a few days for a slime mold to grow.
Wow, there's a plot to an Anime movie in there somewhere...
Wooden armaments to battle your imaginary foes!
... if it gets you down to half HPs you turn into a green slime.
Yellow Mold is CR6 and pretty dangerous stuff. If it escaped the dungeon it could wipe out the village.
Utilizing the synergization of benchmark e-solutions to pre-workaround action items!
And its a lot less messy.
Take two surfaces (overlapping, horizontally ) (cardboard will suffice, and place straws through them (verically)where your destinations are. Submerge it in soap/water solution. Then slowly pull it out and the surface tension will find the most efficient routes between the straws.
Slashdot's rate-of-post filter: Preventing you from posting too many great ideas at once.
The mold didn't find the Tokyo Bay Aqua-Line.
It was probably true at one of them once, and if you're building a new campus today it's not a bad approach, but it's not clear where or when it actually originated.
And if you've been around Frank Lloyd Wright buildings much, you'll hear lots of stories about how they leak unless you're really aggressive about maintenance, and if you're over about 5'6"" (167cm), you'll rapidly notice that the dude was short and didn't mind forcing taller people to duck in buildings he designed...
Bill Stewart
New Fast-Compression-only CPR http://preview.tinyurl.com/dy575ks
The Wikipedia entry for the slime mold species in question indicates that the organism actually does have some sort of primitive intelligence - it could, for example, solve mazes, and learn the pattern of a regularly reoccurring period of cold conditions (reacting appropriately). I see the stuff growing in my garden now and then... the fact that a patch of slime exhibits intelligent behavior is, I don't know, kind of weird.
it is LITERALLY creepy ;-)
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
commenting to undo inadvertent mod.
We studied something like this in my social computing university class, only it was about slime mold "solving" a maze. I never understood why that (or this) was at all interesting; the growth of the slime mold is just a brute force search for food. What you end up with is a minimum spanning tree between the food "nodes." Meh.
I can rent out my bathroom ceiling to an engineering research firm?
Please do not read this sig. Thank you.
and they want to take away our Medicare!
Damping absorbs vibrations. Dampening is caused by moisture.
They do 1D6 of Constitution damage and there's no way to get it back.
Someone should really tell the sientists those little cities and trains they were comparing to were old Godzilla movie sets. The real ones are much bigger and they'd need a hella lot more mold!
"Computers are a lot like Air Conditioners" "They both work great until you start opening Windows"
that Tokyo has a slimy rail system?
--- Asking inconvenient questions for over 30 years...
I assume the mold paths solution simply "converged" to the most efficient way of carrying the nutrients between the nodes. As it was mentioned here, soap bubbles will also "find" the shortest paths, as will the mold's "brute force" approach (broad spread, then coalesce to the most efficient ones).
But the natural solutions would not take into account the human distribution and convenience, as each node (apart from the big central oat flake) have the same appeal to the mold - and possibly the ones closest to the borders have less appeal (or more "cost"). Same goes for the surface tension solution (soap).
What if the human factor shifts the "weight" of some nodes and paths? For example, there might be very few people needing to go from node A to B, but many needing to go from A to C, so although a "natural" solution would only take the distances and positions into account, a "human" solution would want to favor the trip from A to C even if that meant making the A-B trip worse.
So if the mold solution is really very similar to the real rail system, then either Japanese commuters are amazingly "natural" in regards to where they live, where they work, and demographic distribution, or the Japanese railroad engineers missed the human factor when designing the grid. The first possibility is somehow beautiful and creepy at the same time.
O. Steinbock, Á. Tóth, and K. Showalter, "Navigating Complex Labyrinths: Optimal Paths from Chemical Waves," Science 267, 868-871 (1995). http://heracles.chem.wvu.edu/papers.html
... network routing algorithms.
Have gnu, will travel.
Always knew Fred Physarum would turn up again somewhere.
Oliver's law of assumed responsibility: If you're seen fixing it, you will be blamed for breaking it.
At first glance I thought this article was about Steve Ballmer, then I realized if that were the case the tech would not be better; so I continued on to read it....
It's a little sad that somebody, in pursuit of an audience, had to angle the story towards "we could be using mold to make design decisions." Your mass transit planners are not going to call in a consultant with a suitcase full of mold, obviously. The paths chosen for rail have so many political factors that the "most efficient" model has little relevance.
But just stop thinking of utility for a moment. Look at those pictures of the mold growing to reach all points and form little roads between them. That is fantastic! "Because you could then plan light rail and freight logistics and--" STOP! No, don't jump on to the practical applications yet. Take a moment to think about that simple little organism doing that complicated thing and how cool that is. Those pictures are breathtaking.
And after that, maybe try to write a matching algorithm to see if you can predict which paths will form by the slime. And then see if that algorithm offers something that the human-designed ones don't have already. And then maybe integrate and devise new algorithms based on what was learned. And then see what practical applications there are for these algorithms. This is what the scientists and engineers will actually end up doing if it is possible. Can we stop acting like bored little brats that every scientific observation isn't immediately useful?
the London and Tokyo urban planners have the equivalent intelligence to a single celled creature?
http://xkcd.com/399/
Our culture doesn't get smarter, it just finds new ways of being retarded.
mold this up.
What, you don't know a cleric or paladin capable of casting restoration?
It's my favorite food!
I'm trying to teach myself to set people on fire with my mind... Is it hot in here?
Am I the only one thinking of white mice and fjords here?
I was sure this article was going to be about SCO when I saw the title.
Table-ized A.I.
Not very likely. The slime mold in this case solve a kind of combination of a maximum flow-minimum spanning tree problem. There are algorithms with polynomial-time complexity for both problem types, so a computer would probably quickly find the optimal solution. So the computer should be way faster, even for much greater problem instances.
Same as the ant approach, biology solves those problems in NP. It just so happens that it tends to do this is a massively parallel way.
Or indeed oil, which was similarly demonstrated to possess "intelligence", as it can solve a maze due to a pH gradient. Interestingly, that work debunked the claims of intelligence made for this same mold 10 years ago - for solving mazes and finding shortest paths.