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

uh..

[igadget78]

Were they high during this experiment?

I don't care how efficient they are,

[loftwyr]

I'm still not going to ride a slime mold to work.

They did a similar experiment

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

The slime mold had it easy...

[fuzzyfuzzyfungus]

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.

Fred Physarum

[Drantin]

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

wrong conclusion

[circletimessquare]

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

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.

Efficency in building

[RedTeflon]

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.

must have been fun research

[Clover_Kicker]

The next study will involve rust monsters and gelatinous cubes.

A Eureka Moment...almost

[hyades1]

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.

You can do the same thing with soap

[scorp1us]

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.

Re:Slimy competitors

[newcastlejon]

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.