Slime Mold Could Lead To Better Tech 179
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."
watch out for the green slime ... (Score:1, Informative)
... if it gets you down to half HPs you turn into a green slime.
It's actually sort of creepy... (Score:3, Informative)
The Wikipedia entry [wikipedia.org] 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.
Good idea, but wrong ;) (Score:3, Informative)
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.