The Japanese researcher Toshiyuki Nakagaki and his colleagues have
demonstrated that the slime mold's foraging behavior can be used to perform
sophisticated computations, as long as the problems are represented
spatially. Problems solved by the slime mold include not only the shortest
path out of a maze, but also other complex mathematical challenges (like
creating a Voronoi diagram and a Delaunay triangulation).
Despite its ability to solve an array of problems, the slime mold was
designed by evolution to solve just one problem: how to build an optimal
transport network (for its nutrients). So we decided to investigate how the
slime mold, when presented with the task of connecting the major urban areas
of the United States, would design a transport system. Would its design
resemble that of the United States highway system, or would the slime mold
propose a superior one?
https://www.nytimes.com/2012/05/13/opinion/sunday/the-wisdom-of-slime.html
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