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http://discovermagazine.com/2009/jan/071
http://tinyurl.com/ycjaacy
http://www.newscientist.com/article/dn8718
http://www.newscientist.com/article/dn11875
http://www.worldscibooks.com/compsci/7968.html
So let's hear it for Physarum polycephalum!
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> http://discovermagazine.com/2009/jan/071
> http://tinyurl.com/ycjaacy
> http://www.newscientist.com/article/dn8718
> http://www.newscientist.com/article/dn11875
> http://www.worldscibooks.com/compsci/7968.html
>
> So let's hear it for Physarum polycephalum!
After having lost contact with the scientists for over three weeks, the
polcie was called in, when they walked in the lab, they found no trace
of the scientists, nor of the molds, but the gel slab had this peculiar
messaeg on it:
STOP MESSING WITH THE THERMOSTAT OR ELSE!
One of the windows was open.
[To be continued...]
--
/*Francois Labreque*/#local a=x+y;#local b=x+a;#local c=a+b;#macro P(F//
/* flabreque */L)polygon{5,F,F+z,L+z,L,F pigment{rgb 9}}#end union
/* @ */{P(0,a)P(a,b)P(b,c)P(2*a,2*b)P(2*b,b+c)P(b+c,<2,3>)
/* gmail.com */}camera{orthographic location<6,1.25,-6>look_at a }
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Invisible <voi### [at] dev null> wrote:
> http://discovermagazine.com/2009/jan/071
> http://tinyurl.com/ycjaacy
> http://www.newscientist.com/article/dn8718
> http://www.newscientist.com/article/dn11875
> http://www.worldscibooks.com/compsci/7968.html
>
> So let's hear it for Physarum polycephalum!
see, Andrew? even amoebas learn instead of crying it's impossible. ;)
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On 07/12/2011 12:36 PM, Invisible wrote:
> So let's hear it for Physarum polycephalum!
This stuff is weird in that it's large enough to see with the naked eye
(indeed, it can be multiple centimetres across), and yet it's a
single-celled organism.
Reading further, it turns out that it has multiple nuclei, but only a
single cell wall. In other words, it's a multicellular organism, just
without the internal cell walls.
That doesn't make its movement any less amazing, mind you. The other
night I was watching time-lapse photography of it moving on TV. One of
the links above shows a lovely photograph of the fractal networks it
produces. And as it moves it sort of pulsates.
Being a "slime mould", it likes moisture and avoids dryness. It avoids
light, presumably because that might dessicate it. It feeds by slowly
spreading out in all directions, until it finds something edible. Then a
blob of slime engulfs the food, and the rest of the fan dwindles to
nothing, leaving only a network of thin tubes connecting the food pieces
together.
In one experiment, they arranged pieces of food in the same positions as
the cities around Tokyo. The mould spread out, found them all, and
produced a network of tubes remarkably similar to the transport network
around Tokyo. Of course, the transport network was designed by a huge
team of engineers with enormous brains which consume vast amounts of
power. The slime mould did the same thing without any brain cells at
all. (Indeed, the entire network is one continuous macroscopic cell.)
In another experiment, they used the slime mould to control a robot.
It's not clear what they were actually trying to achieve, or what part
the mould actually played. The only Internet documentation I could find
claimed that the mould avoids light, and they used that to make the
robot avoid light. Personally I don't see how having a big complex
microprocessor delegate a trivially implementable function to an organic
entity is particularly "useful", but hey.
Slime moulds can also navigate mazes. Combined with the transport
network result, this demonstrates that the organism clearly has
computational abilities. But unlike digital computers, this thing is
massively parallel. There may yet be some way in which that could be
useful. Then again, it has a top speed of 1 cm per hour. So we're
looking at problems that currently take insane amounts of time, but can
be attacked in a very parallel way. Protein folding, perhaps. Or weather
simulation. Something like that.
The organism also has the ability to learn from past events and
anticipate future ones. It's not surprising that an organism should
evolve such an ability. It is obviously desirable. What it surprising is
that a single-celled organism is sufficiently sophisticated to implement
it. (From the documentation I've seen, it's not clear to me how much
complexity it can cope with. It's still impressive though.)
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On 12/7/2011 4:36, Invisible wrote:
> http://discovermagazine.com/2009/jan/071
I read way back when transistors were something you bought one at a time
about various smart devices built on just a small number of transistors. For
example, there were little carts that would go and seek out bright spaces
near other carts with a light on top until their batteries started to run
down, at which point they'd go find a dark spot to recharge. That one was,
IIRC, like three transistors worth of logic. So yeah, surprisingly
complicated behavior can arise out of very simple logic. (Or more
appropriately we only think it's surprisingly complicated.)
--
Darren New, San Diego CA, USA (PST)
People tell me I am the counter-example.
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On 10/12/2011 09:34 PM, Darren New wrote:
> I read way back when transistors were something you bought one at a time
> about various smart devices built on just a small number of transistors.
> For example, there were little carts that would go and seek out bright
> spaces near other carts with a light on top until their batteries
> started to run down, at which point they'd go find a dark spot to
> recharge. That one was, IIRC, like three transistors worth of logic. So
> yeah, surprisingly complicated behavior can arise out of very simple
> logic. (Or more appropriately we only think it's surprisingly complicated.)
It still impresses me that you can build complex self-organising,
self-replicating and self-repairing structures using something as
trivial as the reaction/diffusion equations. Man, if only I understood
how the **** that actually works...
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On 12/12/2011 09:18 AM, Invisible wrote:
> It still impresses me that you can build complex self-organising,
> self-replicating and self-repairing structures using something as
> trivial as the reaction/diffusion equations. Man, if only I understood
> how the **** that actually works...
Damnit, I just wasted my entire morning staring at this...
http://texturegarden.com/java/rd/
My eyes hurt now. :-/
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