The Insane Biology of: Slime Mold

And everybody keeps wondering how artificial intelligence is going to take over when it doesn't actually have a brain. It doesn't need a brain it's going to use slime molds all hail the slime mold Overlord

Very minor correction at 13:00: TSP doesn't just take exponential time, it is factorial time. Which grows even faster than exponential.

I love this so much. This is basically a biological analog computer. It utilizes it's senses and boils things down to a {Yes or a No}. So they are surprisingly good at what they need to do.

Japan used slime molds to redo their transportation system in Tokyo which was an amazing feat. Saw it first hand and these slime molds are so intelligent that they find the fastest route to and from connected locations even if it's just for experimentation purposes.

I remember hearing about slime mold as a child and always wanted to know more. I had behavioral issues though so not many teachers would answer my questions

Now I have this image in my head: Where the higher up workers for UPS show up for their shift. They go over the daily slime mold array before sending out their instructions to their delivery driver's lol 😆 Man I really hope someone makes a skit similar to this. If done right, the sarcasm & science is there for a really clever skit.

Slime is consciousnes. consciousness 1.the state of being aware of and responsive to one's surroundings. "she failed to regain consciousness and died two days later" Similar: awareness, wakefulness, alertness, responsiveness, sentience. Opposite: unconsciousness 2. a person's awareness or perception of something. The more you sense the more alive you are.

The more I observe nature the more I realize intelligence is not brain dependent.

(13:00) Slime mold doesn't magically compute solutions in linear time while computers do it in exponential time. The very high cost of algorithms used to solve problems like the Traveling Salesman is only to find the absolute best path, the most optimal. Slime mold can probably find amazing solutions, but it's not trying to find the best since the cost of doing that would require a huge amount of time and energy. Just like slime mold, computer scientists have devised algorithms to find great approximations of the optimal solutions to these hard problems (called NP-hard). Some are in fact much more efficient than slime mold's "linear time" approach, with O(log(N)) for simulated annealing for example – a classic approach to the Traveling Salesman.

There is nothing "random" about nature. It's clear there is intelligence and decision making at all levels. Personally I believe the theory of evolution needs a massive overhaul, in particular the whole notion of random mutation needs to be scrapped entirely. Nature is far too elegant, efficient and obviously exceedingly intelligent to rely on a random process to be responsible for creation. This is what scientist Barbara McClintock discovered way back in the 50's. She won a Nobel Prize for her discoveries that took decades to be accepted because they flew in the face of conventional scientific understanding. She was actually far ahead of her time and back then her work obviously offended the stubborn patriarchal nature of the establishment. She was basically ostracised and subsequently awarded for her brilliant work.

Slime molds make better decisions than me. 😂

I love the idea of a biological computer chip. Biomechanical constructs have been a staple of speculative fiction for a long time, and I can't help but see this slime mold chip as something of a first step in that direction. To use a gaming term, it is like we are discovering a brand new tech tree. I have no idea how feasible this technology will be in the face of our incoming AI overlords, but I'm looking forward to finding out.

This is crazy, but also a good explanation of how AI could be intelligent without being conscious.

The idea of slime molds solving the complex exponecial tasks lineraly, really reminds one of quantom computing It brings to the front the idea that organisms are natural quantom computers capable of compound computation, even on the smallest of scales (the whole idea of microtubuli) If that's the case, than computer parts using slime molds are essencially the most efficient quantom computers that humanity has made so far

The way this slime works is nuts and amazing and so sci fi! Well done!

the CG in the venom movies got to be at least partially inspired by these things

Outstanding video. I’m amazed at how utterly intelligent slime mold is

The goal of the slime mold in optimizing resources differs from our sociological death drive for prestige optimization in that we aspire to improve prestige at the potential cost of our physiological and intellectual viability.

this is the single wildest video I have ever watched.

Using slime moulds in the Toyko rail network reminds me of the giant model of the San Francisco bay used to demonstrate the location and strength of currents in the real bay. It was in the Alcatraz escape episode of Mythbusters, I think. A purely analogue simulation of something too complex to simulate digitally.