Quote from: Crypt_Current on November 08, 2012, 09:51:31 PM

Quote from: myrkul on November 08, 2012, 09:48:02 PM

Quote from: Crypt_Current on November 08, 2012, 09:43:57 PM

Quote from: myrkul on November 08, 2012, 05:19:42 PM

Quote from: mobodick on November 08, 2012, 05:16:52 PM

That is why people try to grow complexity nowadays, instead of designing it. It turns out evolution is pretty efficient at this process despite its seeming inefficiency of exploring a possibility space.

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

Sorry to go off-topic ( Cheesy

), but this reminds me of potato chips that look like Abraham Lincoln...

The potato chip that looks like Lincoln was an accident of nature. The slime mold is intentional. They placed food at the relative locations of the cities surrounding Tokyo, and allowed the slime mold to determine the most efficient and resilient paths between them.

Sooo... Slime mold says we're right, so we should pat ourselves on the back? Did we already know that slime mold always takes the most efficient routes to food?

The point is more that emergent behaviour can solve problems.
There is not much intelligence in the way the mould finds the path.
It simply makes lots of random connections and those that transport the most grow stronger.
It leads to optimal solutions that are hard to grasp by mathematics. It's a bit of a fishing-net strategy. You throw out a net and see what sticks.

Edit: and i would also like to add that the mold map is a lot less optimal for humans than the real map.
http://cache.gawker.com/assets/images/8/2010/01/slimevtokyo2.jpg
It makes you travel way further in some cases. For the mold it's not a problem that the distribution is a bit slow as long as it is energetically cheap.
For humans, well, if you depend on the train to go to work every day then you don't want to take a detour.