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."

Comments

Fred Physarum

[Drantin]

To think. After all these years, Fred Physarum is finally getting the recognition he deserves.

Re:wrong conclusion

[julesh]

the proper conclusion is that japanese transportation engineers are no smarter than slime molds

Or indeed soap, which is also able to perform similar optimization tasks: take two pieces of perspex and join them together using bolts arranged in the pattern of your major destinations with a gap of around 1-2cm between them. Dip in a strong soap/water mixture and remove carefully. You should find a series of large bubbles have formed, with edges running between the bolts. Surface tension will probably have resulted in those edges being an optimal or close to optimal solution to the problem of joining them together with the most efficient network. Repeat several times, take the most common result.

Simple energy reduction problems like this aren't a useful test of anything. There are plenty of natural processes that don't involve intelligence that are more than capable of solving them.