The chunk 182 The message -946-

He was capable of finding the shortest or the most optimal way to different sources of food. He could move faster than ever and think deeper than used to. Ahmed achieved this by creating a "process to selectively amplify preferred routes and remove redundant links at the same time."

"Although the task of connecting the dots does not seem difficult, finding the most optimal and economical way to connect them requires complex mathematical calculations.
In 2009, Japanese scientists placed Plasmodium ... on a map of Tokyo, and 23 hours later, the monster captured all major cities in Japan! Thus, an almost exact copy of the railway network connecting the cities of Japan was obtained. Calculations showed that in the places of discrepancies the slime mold developed a more profitable route than the one embodied by people.
Having caused a lot of doubts, the experiment quickly "spread" to other laboratories. For example, models of road networks were obtained on maps of England and Spain, in some cases including extensions and changes made recently due to suboptimal initial planning. The study clearly demonstrated the ability of the slime mold to plan transport routes as well as professional engineers. Naturally, myxomycete is not able to take into account landscape features, therefore it gives a picture only for ideal conditions. However, this does not diminish the prospects for using Physarum polycephalum for finding optimal solutions in both engineering and biological systems. Perhaps, in the future, with their help, it will be possible to build an infrastructure with improved architecture, more efficient and faster information networks, power lines, and also use them in the study of self-organizing networks (arrays of sensors, wireless mesh systems)."


 III