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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
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!
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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