grintr01 的最愛

This is incredible:

“Slime molds also have their own kind of intelligence. In 2010, Japanese researcher Toshioyuki Nakagaki, of Hokkaido University, challenged a slime mold to work its way through a maze. And it did much more than that. Within 24 hours it had found the shortest way through the maze. Nakagaki then challenged the slime mold with a map of Tokyo, arranging small piles of oats (slime molds love oats) on all the suburbs and railway stations. The slime mold created a pattern from oat pile to oat pile that was almost identical to the Tokyo metro system map, finding the shortest distance between any two points. What’s more, slime molds have repeated these feats of highway design for the United States and Canada; complicated engineering, even by human standards! Engineers are now looking to use slime molds to help design more efficient transport systems.”

Source: Pike S 2018, ‘Nature News: Slime molds are beautiful and smart’. Viewed at www.fosters.com/news/20180814/nature-news-slime-molds-are-beautiful-and-smart on 20 August 2021.