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Slime Mould Maps our Universe (sorta)
Over the past decade or so, researchers have been realizing that slime moulds are better at optimising travel paths than anything else. Build a tiny city with slime mould food at building locations, and they will optimize delivery routes. Layout a nation of cities, they’ll optimize the highways. Slime moulds… they work together to get that mapping done. No, I don’t know how single-celled organisms do this, I just know they do. Computer science researchers have been trying to learn from the mold, and have created algorithms based on how the molds seem to decide their paths. These algorithms are able to produce the same kinds of dendritic looking paths that we’re used to seeing in, well, trees… And the large scale structure of the universe.
As our universe formed, it gravitationally collapsed from a mostly smooth cloud of material into clusters and walls of galaxies. Because this is all driven by gravity, you end up with these cool gravitational potentials that map to the shortest paths between the biggest clusters. Knowing that is awesome. Mapping that is hard.
This is where the slime mould comes in. Slime has our back on the mapping.
To be clear, much to my disappointment, scientists did not create a physical map of galaxies and let the slime mould connect the model galaxies. When I read the headline “Astronomers Use Slime Mould…
