Slime Mold Mimics Canadian Highway Network in Experiment
Posted on March 26, 2012
Dr. Selim Akl, a professor at Queen's University's School of Computing, placed rolled oats on a map of Canada, covering the major urban areas. One urban area held the slime mold. The slime mold reached out for the food and created thin tubes that eventually formed a network mirroring the Canadian highway system. The slime mold, Physarum polycephalum, builds up these sophisticated networks to transport nutrients between distant part of its extended body.
Dr. Akl says, "By showing species as low as slime mold can compute a network as complex as the Canadian highway system, we were able to provide some evidence that nature computes." Take a look:
Dr. Akl's study, co-authored by Andrew Adamatzky (University of the West of England, United Kingdom) is being published in the International Journal of Natural Computing Research.
Dr. Akl plans to collect more examples to support his claim that nature computes. He explains, for example, that the leaf of a plant uses 99% of the light it receives from the sun, while the best engineered solar cells have an efficiency of only 35%.