What could human engineers possibly learn from the lowly slime mold? Reliable, cost-efficient network construction, apparently: a recent experiment suggests that Physarum polycephalum, a gelatinous fungus-like mold, might actually lead the way to improved technological systems, such as more robust computer and mobile communication networks.
yup
Anyway it’s an interesting theme.
Agreed, I find the idea of computation via cellular automata pretty interesting. This must ultimately be how our own brains evolved starting from a few cells working together to ever more complex structures.
Although seeing the daily news I sometimes have my doubts about this evolution. In these it is only made clear that we share 60% of our DNA with a potato.
What I find interesting is that at macro level humanity behaves no different than a slimemold. If we treat humanity as a whole as an organism, with individual humans as individual cells, then its behavior is pretty simple. It extracts resources and creates paths to channel them towards its main body. When we see cities and roads from space, it’s basically just a giant planetary sized slime covering the globe.