Slime mold form a map of the Tokyo-area railway system | Tokyo
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When the researchers place food at cities on the map, the fungus collaborates, spreading out to map many possible configurations and then dying away to highlight the shortest routes between cities and the most efficient overall system map. For more about the problem-solving power inherent in networks, see "Networked" (May-June 2010). Via http://harvardmagazine.com/2010/05/networked
Comments
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If that's the case, why not superimpose ma map of the railway system over the finished configuration.I'm a little bit skeptical.
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How long did this take?
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This is what the Human race is like once we start space exploration. We're here to spread life throughout the universe. We're Mold people!!!
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Watched this at surrey uni. Thought I was on acid. :/
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What we learned fm this video? Tokyo's rail network is really, really complicated.
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Not plants, animals or fungii, slime molds, next to man, are one of the strangest creatures in nature. See YouTube video "Slime molds and other strange creatures, Simplified".
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Politically Correct Slime says you can be colored yellow and still be efficient in traffic! Oh, and so does the slime mold.
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the molds that scavenge on old food, and slime molds(that we see here) are two very different kinds of organisms
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It's like Engineering is starting to become a mix of science and technology mixed with nature. Using nature as the inspiration and sort of blueprint for the technology. We as humans have been inspired by nature for centuries. But we've tried so hard to get away from nature we seem to be coming back to it now more than ever. We have the questions, nature has the answers.
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excellent!
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collective distributed decision making is a kind of intelligence.
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slime mold such as P. Polycephalum can also be classified under the Kingdom Ameobazoa as proposed by The New Higher Level Classification of Eukaryotes with Emphasis on the Taxonomy of Protists (J. Eukaryot. Microbiol., 52(5), 2005 pp. 399–451)
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Two thoughts. One is that we definitely do not live in a mechanistic Universe. Sorry to all of the reductionists out there, but we do not so deal with it. The other is that we might be dealing with an alien intelligence---right here on Earth! Further testing is required to test that hypothesis. Hey Harvard, have you tried actual communication?
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amazing.
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nice, maybe a new way to architect