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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'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.
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.
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
Maybe the slime mold has been evolving for millions of years and there really isn't much in the way of improvements that can be made.
Sigs are too short to say anything truly profound so read the above post instead.
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.
It's a smart scientist who does not re-invent the wheel.
Don't know something? Look it up. Still don't know? Then ask.
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!
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!
The next study will involve rust monsters and gelatinous cubes.
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.
Yes, and that's how they are going to fund the new, cheaper train network. Selling Virgin Mary cheese sandwiches, Nun buns, and Jesus-burgers (Jeezburgers).
"This post contains words, known to the State of California to cause thought. Wash brain thoroughly after reading."
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.
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
Sadly, in study after study, the Virgin Mary has been found to be remarkably inefficient, particularly when compared to medieval saints and or numerous Hindu gods.
Please do not read this sig. Thank you.
He can certainly equal the performance of the average day-trader.
Warning: this article may contain humor, sarcasm, parody, and perhaps even irony. Read at your own risk.
I can rent out my bathroom ceiling to an engineering research firm?
Please do not read this sig. Thank you.
Ironically the wheel is one of the few things nature didn't invent first. There are beasties with magnets in their heads, some with electrical generators in their muscles, sophisticated echolocation etc. etc.. A wheel and axle may be beyond Mother Nature's reach, barring some amazing fluke.
Still, reinventing the wheel isn't always such a bad thing; the first solution is rarely the optimal one.
If God forks the Universe every time you roll a die, he'd better have a damned good memory.
They do 1D6 of Constitution damage and there's no way to get it back.
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.
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?
Perhaps not quite. There are beetles forming spherical "boulders" of organic matter, that's quite close to wheel conceptually. Spherical plants moved by wind. And you can find even closer analogues in microorganisms...
The main problem with evolving large scale "proper" wheel, I guess, is of intermediate structures; apparently they were worse for survival then the alternatives.
One that hath name thou can not otter
So now only to find an organism which likes to visit every node on the map, and yet tries to omit already visited spots. A colony-like species preferably, to have large number of individual for statistical analysis...
One that hath name thou can not otter
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.