Slime mold grows network just like Tokyo rail system

http://www.wired.com/wiredscience/2010/01/slime-mold-grows-network-just-like-tokyo-rail-system/

by j_baker • 17 years ago

51 21 17 years ago

wired.com

ax0n• 17 years ago

This is cool, but the headline looks like something written for Fark!

naz• 17 years ago

My, that looks like a yummy slime mold!

obneq• 17 years ago

Aloha obneq, welcome to NetHack! You are a neutral male human Tourist. You are in non-scoring discovery mode. What do you want to zap? [p or ?] You may wish for an object. For what do you wish? slime mold q - a slime mold. What do you want to eat? [b-jq or ?]

My, that was a yummy slime mold!

JCThoughtscream• 17 years ago

I wonder if this applicable to city planning? Constructing a plexiglass landscape in miniature, scattering a few flakes in the right places, then letting loose the mold... let nature calculate maximum efficiency for you!

blasdel• 17 years ago

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MONIAC_Computer

10ren• 17 years ago

A fun experiment with a striking result.

The environment provided for the slime molds doesn't seem to record mountains and lakes etc, so they can't be expected to choose the same system.

When we find that engineers and nature have arrived at similar solutions, I think it's the engineers that we should marvel at.

Even soap bubbles organize themselves to minimize surface area. http://www.soapbubble.dk/en/bubbles/geometry.php and apparently Centuries ago, architects discovered that experimenting with soap bubbles could help them define the most economical form for the actual structure. http://www.encyclopedia.com/doc/1G2-3407500197.html

zemaj• 17 years ago

I don't get it...

It's this just a variant on the shortest path problem. Even a bad solution is going to look similar to a real rail network. There are plenty of good, easy algorithms to solve this, much faster than waiting a day for slime to grow.

Confused as to how this got in Science & Wired. What am I missing (I didn't read the Science report, so maybe there's something there?)

jvdh• 17 years ago

It's actually a lot more like the travelling salesman problem, for which there are no algorithms (well, some heuristical algorithms).

Sukotto2• 17 years ago

It's actually more of a traveling salaryman problem :-)

m_eiman• 17 years ago

Well, they did construct a computerized version of the method the slime uses to construct the network. Also they say that it's suitable for use in a dynamic network where traffic flows change and nodes are added and removed.

tel• 17 years ago

Because prior to seeing it happen, slime mold configuration wasn't expected to be equivalent to railroad optimization. And then it was.

Saying things are obvious after they've happened is 100% useless. Demonstrating you have the mental models to say these things predictively is pretty exciting, though.

If you can do that, go become a scientist. Use those models. Publish papers. You'll get into Science, too.

RiderOfGiraffes• 17 years ago

Dup: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1071568

Although as so often happens, the first submission sinks without a trace, a subsequent duplicate submission gets an upvote on the "newest" page, makes it to the front page and thereby gets noticed generally. This is one argument to suggest why the duplication detection algorithm should not be tightened significantly - if a link has any real merit, and it's news rather than something old that someone has run across, then it has several chances of not being missed, becuase it will get submitted several times.

Earlier submissions of the same story also sank (mostly) without trace:

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1071533

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1071093

Confusion• 17 years ago

The submission could also be counted as an automatic upvote, achieving the same effect, while still allowing tightening of the duplication detection algorithm. One article with two votes is better than two articles with one vote. For low numbers of votes, I guess it shouldn't matter the first few votes are old.

ars• 17 years ago

"The submission could also be counted as an automatic upvote"

It does already. If submit a url that is already there, it gives it an automatic upvote.

j_baker• 17 years ago

Note that the algorithm is weighted against time as well. If I upvote something that was posted a month ago, it is practically useless.

Mz• 17 years ago

It's the same story but three different articles. The article linked here has better photos and is better written. So it doesn't surprise me that it got attention when the other two didn't. Though if anyone is interested, one of the other two has a (soundless) 38 second video showing the growth of the slime mold. Pretty cool stuff.

dtegart2• 17 years ago

I attended a lecture about this at Oxford. It has also been done for Britain's railway system and came quite close to the post-Beeching layout.

jermy• 17 years ago

A recent paper uses it to model the UK Motorway network - http://arxiv.org/abs/0912.3967

Any references to the work on using slime to mimic the UK rail network that you mentioned? The best I could find was the following from http://www.springerlink.com/content/7tw4745823645128/

"In practical terms such a process may also be witnessed in the evolution of real infrastructure networks, such as British railways following the Beeching reviews in the early '60s [8,9]. In these reviews, the flux along various routes was measured and routes with too low a level of traffic, mainly branch lines, were targeted for closure. At the same time, major routes were strengthened to cope with the expected source-sink relationships for both passenger and freight traffic. Interestingly, the reports focussed on efficient rather than any explicit consideration of resilience, which may explain the sensitivity of the current UK rail network to disruption."

Where: [8] British Railways Board: The development of the major railway trunk routes (1965) [9] British Transport Commission: The reshaping of british railways - part 1: report (1963)

dtegart2• 17 years ago

I can't seem to find anything either. It was part of Silicon Valley comes to Oxford 2009 if that helps your search.

ambition• 17 years ago

Like the slime mold, the model first creates a fine mesh network that goes everywhere, and then continuously refines the network so that the tubes carrying the most cargo grow more robust and redundant tubes are pruned.

Hey, that's like how brains mature!

Slime mold grows network just like Tokyo rail system

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