“每日科技报告”第10期 Slime mold(粘液菌) Design Mimics Tokyo's Rail System

sea_star666

What could human engineers possibly learn from the lowly slime mold?Reliable, cost-efficient network construction, apparently: a recentexperiment suggests that Physarum polycephalum, a gelatinousfungus-like mold, might actually lead the way to improved technologicalsystems, such as more robust computer and mobile communication networks.

This is the network formation in Physarum polycephalum. (A) At t=0, a small plasmodium of Physarum was placed at the location of Tokyoin an experimental arena bounded by the Pacific coastline (whiteborder) and supplemented with additional food sources at each of themajor cities in the region (white dots). (B to F) The plasmodium grewout from the initial food source with a contiguous margin andprogressively colonized each of the food sources. Behind the growingmargin, the spreading mycelium resolved into a network of tubesinterconnecting the food sources.

This revelation comes after a team of Japanese and Britishresearchers observed that the slime mold connected itself to scatteredfood sources in a design that was nearly identical to Tokyo's railsystem.The related report will be published by the journal Science on 22 January.
Atsushi Tero from Hokkaido University in Japan, along withcolleagues elsewhere in Japan and the United Kingdom, placed oat flakeson a wet su**ce in locations that corresponded to the citiessurrounding Tokyo, and allowed the Physarum polycephalum moldto grow outwards from the center. They watched the slime moldself-organize, spread out, and form a network that was comparable inefficiency, reliability, and cost to the real-world infrastructure ofTokyo's train network.
"Some organisms grow in the form of an interconnected network aspart of their normal foraging strategy to discover and exploit newresources," Tero writes in the report. "Physarum is a large,single-celled amoeboid organism that forages for patchily distributedfood sources... [It] can find the shortest path through a maze orconnect different arrays of food sources in an efficient manner withlow total length yet short average minimum distance between pairs offood sources, with a high degree of fault tolerance to accidentaldisconnection."The researchers knew that capturing the essence of this biologicalsystem in ** rules could be useful to inform the construction ofself-organizing and cost-efficient networks in the real world. Theycaptured the core mechanisms needed by the slime mold to connect itsfood sources in an efficient manner and incorporated them into amathematical model.

sea_star666

顶顶！

vera2007

恩，这则消息我也听说了》。。。。。。。。。。。

wuhao080910

真的希望我自己能像楼主一样坚持看