Computers and Networks Can Learn From Slime Mold
Slime mold could eventually lead the way to improved technology in computers and communications networks.
This observation came from a group of Japanese and British researchers who found that slime mold connects itself to scattered food sources, self-organize, spread out, and form a network that was comparable in efficiency, reliability, and cost to the infrastructure of Tokyo’s train network.
Atsushi Tero from Hokkaido University and his team, 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.
“Some organisms grow in the form of an interconnected network as part of their normal foraging strategy to discover and exploit new resources,” Tero writes in the report. “Physarum is a large, single-celled amoeboid organism that forages for patchily distributed food sources… [It] can find the shortest path through a maze or connect different arrays of food sources in an efficient manner with low total length yet short average minimum distance between pairs of food sources, with a high degree of fault tolerance to accidental disconnection.”
There are two ways to look at this situation. The Tokyo network is not as world class as it seems for it is only as good as slime mold.
But it also shows that nature have developed extremely efficient approaches to real-life problems. If an organism has survived through evolution, it has learnt to deal with the complex issues in its environment.
There are much which we can learn from these organisms, though it will take some getting used to. I imagine those professors and designers will not accept the fact that their masterpiece or decision decisions were actually based on slime mold.
Paul is a geek who shares his thoughts on technology, gadgets, social networks and football in this blog. Stay in touch with his updates by subscribing to the RSS feeds or Email. Thanks for visiting Seventoten and leaving a comment.
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