Date: August 7, 2023.
Picture this: Busy salespeople trying to crack the puzzle of finding the shortest route to visit multiple cities and return home swiftly, saving time and money while avoiding repeating any routes. This is the traveling salesman problem (TSP), a notoriously complex problem.
Mathematicians and computer scientists have devised clever strategies involving imaginary lines to crack the code, however, as the number of cities increases, the complexity of the problem skyrockets.
Now, brace yourself for a mind-boggling twist! Imagine a brainless, single-celled blob taking on this mind-bending challenge!
Let me introduce you to the fantastic-
Slime Molds!
Organisms that blur the boundaries between animals, plants, and fungi. These ingenious creatures possess remarkable traits like swarm intelligence, communication, memory, and learning, all without a brain! Like plants, they share the same cell wall structure as cellulose, but unlike them, slime molds are heterotrophs and don’t produce their own food. They also reproduce through spores like fungi but lack chitin in their cell walls. These enigmatic organisms fall into the Protist category — a classification for things we’re still trying to fully comprehend.
One particularly captivating slime mold is Physarum polycephalum, a Myxomycete, commonly known as plasmodial slime mold. What’s astonishing is that Physarum polycephalum consists of just one cell! Yes, all the intricate branching you see in this picture is from a single cell.
When two of these slime molds come together, they fuse, including their nuclei, to become a single entity. Once fused, the organism doesn't divide anymore, it simply grows. It can expand up to two feet in diameter. The nuclei inside will continue dividing, their count reaching up to millions. The creature contracts and relaxes using actin and myosin — the same muscle proteins found in humans. This slime mold can crawl at a pace of 4 centimeters per hour, distributing nutrients throughout its expanding body. And here’s the mind-blower:
These fused slime molds exhibit intelligence, despite lacking an actual brain.
They can learn to navigate challenging environments, share their knowledge with others by fusing together, and even solve complex mazes while making clever nutritional choices (unlike us humans lol *pizza be yummm…). Researchers conducted a study comparing food items with different protein-to-carb ratios. They found out slime molds blend two food sources in the right proportion to make them healthy.
P.S. They avoid salt.
Prepare for another mind-blowing experiment! Researchers placed oat flakes (their favorite heart-healthy meal) on an agar plate, arranging them to mimic Tokyo’s layout. They would put light sources on the plate to prevent slime molds from taking that route (since slime molds avoid light). Initially, they spread across the plate but gradually reorganize, forming the best route to their food sources; cities in this case. Miraculously, the slime mold adapted and created a route that closely resembled the Tokyo rail system; — an astounding parallel to the traveling salesman problem! The Phycerum crawls across an agar plate leaving behind a slime trail. Slime mold will avoid this slime trail, avoiding places it has already traveled, giving it an externalized spatial memory.
But wait, there’s more! Scientists are tapping into the slime mold’s problem-solving prowess to crack Combinatorial Optimization problems (problems with numerous solutions, where you have to find the most optimal solution), which are notoriously tricky due to their multitude of possibilities. These problems often stump experts in artificial intelligence, software engineering, and applied mathematics. However, our brainless slime molds excel in this domain. Through millions of years of evolutionary fine-tuning, they compensate for their lack of a brain and their sluggish pace, emerging as problem-solving powerhouses.
These slimy geniuses can optimize complex real-world scenarios, such as planning the shortest delivery routes for a company or devising the most efficient bus routes for a school district. As the number of cities or stops increases, these problems become exponentially tougher. But fear not! While traditional computers struggle with the ever-growing complexity, slime molds handle it like a breeze.
By processing information concurrently, they solve these problems in linear time.
To speed up their experiments, scientists are developing algorithms inspired by slime molds, such as the Amoeba TSP. These algorithms mimic the behavior and constraints of slime molds, enabling swift testing of various scenarios. Fascinatingly, researchers are even exploring slime molds as a physical computing medium. In a groundbreaking 2018 experiment, they coated slime mold tubes with a conductive substance, turning them into living chips. The slime mold’s reaction to real-world optimization problems was nothing short of astonishing, with the conductor transmitting information at lightning speed.
It’s a testament to how the intelligence honed through millions of years of evolution can rival artificial intelligence while maintaining simplicity.
These brainless slimes come together to form a vast living and learning network, astounding us with their ability to expand, consume, and reproduce. Witness their remarkable capabilities as they stake their claim in our world, creating a microcosm of unimaginable wonders!
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