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Slime Mold......Mycelium Running
    #5372390 -

I just started to read Stamets new book, Mycelium Running. So far so good. :tongue:

I have heard him talk about this test before and it's in the book. A test that was carried out by Toshuyiki Nakagki(2000)with 'slime mold' or Physarum polycephalum.

He placed a maze over a petri dish with an Agar mix and placed a food source at the entrance and exit.

As it grew, it made it's through the maze but taking the shortest route and 'capture' both food source.

Demonstrating a form of intelligence........

Anyway to my question: Can this be done at home, to recreate this.

I am just floored by this and would love to see it, if it can be done with a reason of success.

You might not know but what are your thoughts :bongload:

I did a quick Google..........

Physarum polycephalum

Physarum polycephalum......Pics
Hopefully the mods are ok with this here :stoned:

:mushroom2:


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Atheist Chat

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Re: Slime Mold......Mycelium Running [Re: Snaggletooth]
    #5372415 -

Fascinating, sounds like an idea...all you have to do is get a mold of a round maze(s) done, the diameter of the maze should be same as your petri-dishes, and it has to be the exact height as the petri (so it touches bottom to top), otherwise the mycellium will probably just grow over it.

I just dont know how you would go about getting the maze made though.

Pluto

Edited by Plutonium (03/06/06 09:19 PM)

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Re: Slime Mold......Mycelium Running [Re: Tien]
    #5372559 -

yes we could start a underground gambling ring that places bets on mycelium strain races....


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Re: Slime Mold......Mycelium Running [Re: liloldme]
    #5372585 -

You know if there was a way to pull that off would be interesting indeed  :stoned:


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Atheist Chat

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Re: Slime Mold......Mycelium Running [Re: Snaggletooth]
    #5373289 -

Slime mold is a single cell, there's no neural network. It is not figuring out a maze like a human or a mouse would by abstract reasoning. It also isn't entering the maze, and finding the exit. What's really going on in Nakagaki's study is that he first allows the slime to fully populate the agar in the maze, filling every nook and cranny. Only then does he place two wet pieces of oatmeal (its favorite food) at two places on the periphery of the maze. The slime will then mostly move onto the two pieces of food, withdrawing from the parts of the maze not directly linked between the two food sources, leaving only a small tube network still connecting the two large parts of the cell. This is what he calls 'solving' the maze, and credits the slime with intelligence. Come on, if I put bubble gum in the maze and pulled it from two places, it would contract into the shortest path, too. Bazooka Joe just isn't that smart.

Here's the study in all its shameless glory. Much more interesting is the study by Tsuda et al, incorporating the natural information processing of Physarum cells to control a mobile robot to avoid lighted areas. This interface of biochemical dynamics with synthetic intelligence is the real wave of the future, I believe. Here's Tsuda's study.

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Re: Slime Mold......Mycelium Running [Re: Snaggletooth]
    #5373297 -

Snaggletooth said:
... Can this be done at home, to recreate this.

I am just floored by this and would love to see it, if it can be done with a reason of success.


Sure can, especially a myc cultivator's home. Forgot to post this above. It's one of the most popular teaching tools around and one of the easiest to culture.

Here's some experiments.
How to culture it, and where to buy it, and more experiments.

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Re: Slime Mold......Mycelium Running [Re: mogur]
    #5373342 -

The difference between your piece of bubble gum and the slime mold is that your gum would stretch along whatever path you pulled it, whereas the slime mold finds the shortest connection between the food sources. What's amazing is that the slime mold has the ability to determine the connection(s) making up the shortest path. This of course has nothing to do with conscious determination but is more along the lines of, but more complex than, something like chemotaxis. It's not trivial.

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Re: Slime Mold......Mycelium Running [Re: ChuangTzu]
    #5373368 -

Huh? It is exactly chemotaxis, by definition. Did you not check out my links? How a single cell organism is able to coordinate information from stimuli to control migration towards or away from those stimuli is a fascinating (and not a trivial) study, as I already referenced. Here is another study by Miyake, Yano, and Shimizu.

What I do find bizarre and self-aggrandizing is Nakagaki's claim that this amazing ability is evidence of intelligent problem solving. That is what he is claiming, even in the title of his article that I linked to in my above post.

As for the bubble gum, you must have missed the part where the slime mold starts off fully populating (filling) the maze. The gum must be allowed this initial state, also. Now, when you pull the gum at the entrance and the exit of the maze, what happens? The parts of the gum that are in dead-end corridors of the maze will be pulled out of those dead-ends and eventually the gum will become a single string that takes the shortest route through the maze. I'm sure you must be able to visualize this. Look at the maze itself in Nakagaki's article.

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Re: Slime Mold......Mycelium Running [Re: mogur]
    #5373376 -

Check out also the Eumycetozoan Project's educational resources page:
http://slimemold.uark.edu/educationframe.htm

They have ID info and guides for capturing and cultivating.

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Re: Slime Mold......Mycelium Running [Re: mogur]
    #5373827 -

I seeee, ok thanks man for the links....I'll check them out  :thumbup:


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Atheist Chat

Edited by Snaggletooth (03/07/06 11:05 AM)

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Re: Slime Mold......Mycelium Running [Re: mogur]
    #5375629 -

So it sounds like not a huge surprise.....bummer

I don't think I am as interested in it now.... :stoned:


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Re: Slime Mold......Mycelium Running [Re: Snaggletooth]
    #5375836 -

Ah, man, maybe I was a little hard on the beaver last night, I just felt a little tricked by the hype when I looked at what was really happening. My experience with scientists that are more concerned with publicity than reality, has probably jaded me a bit. Thanks for turning me on to the study of slime molds, though, they really don't need hyping to be fascinating. A single cell critter that can span several feet in size, and can coordinate motile response to external signals by some complex chemical/electrical information processing is at least as interesting as a naked monkey or a hungry mouse, anyway.  :naughty:

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Re: Slime Mold......Mycelium Running [Re: mogur]
    #5376513 -

No man, I read the study. It's more complicated than chemotaxis because the organism doesn't simply move toward a food source, but moves towards several simultaneously while maintaining a connective network between them of minimum length. I'm just not sure the same thing happens with bubble gum even if I can visualize it. Even if you fill the maze with bubble gum and then start bunching it up on two sides, I'm pretty sure the clumps would grow for a bit then possibly break in the middle somewhere, while areas would break off and not move at all leaving a hole in the middle. I dunno man, maybe we should try it, then we can publish a study about intelligent gum.

To be fair to Nakagaki though, one would have to have viewed that presentation to be able to make any inferences from those slides—they're all out of context for us. In that last paper you linked, he gives a more detailed description of the decision mechanism which doesn't mention slime mold intelligence at all unless I missed something.

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Re: Slime Mold......Mycelium Running [Re: ChuangTzu]
    #5377044 -

Well it is interesting but I don't know if making the observation in a home setting worth while.

Honestly some of this is over my head, but nerveless I like the discussion.



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Re: Slime Mold......Mycelium Running [Re: Snaggletooth]
    #5377595 -

I thought I shared this with people here a couple of years ago...It was pretty interesting. By the third trip through the maze, the mycelium would 'cheat' by climbing right over the walls of the maze as you can see below. The reward was sterilized rye grains at the end.
RR


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Re: Slime Mold......Mycelium Running [Re: Snaggletooth]
    #5377827 -

The overall mechanics of what is happening in these studies is pretty straightforward. The slime mold shoots out a network of tubes in all directions until it stumbles upon a food source and moves towards it. If more than one piece of food is found, then roughly equal portions of the cell move toward the food, retracting all dead end tubes and leaving only tubes that connect the large parts of the cell. The connecting tubes that have the longest length are also retracted, leaving only connecting tubes with the shortest length. If barriers create multiple connecting paths of equal length, then the tubes in all of these paths are maintained. Even in Nakagaki's maze, you can see that the tubes did NOT resolve into a single path because there was more than one path of equal length.

On the other hand, the mechanism of this rather simple behavior is very complex, and in spite of much research, is yet to be completely understood. Various guesses involve in-phase and out-of-phase oscillations, chemical gradients, and wave propagations. For our discussion, these gory details are not very interesting.

My point is that although the mechanics are straightforward and no more impressive than the ability of fur on an animal to align itself into patterns, we, as humans, tend to view the results of such behavior on an intelligence scale. I find it disingenuous to take the highly evolved, food seeking and preservation behavior of a single celled organism, place it into a situation that we consider a puzzle, and when that behavior gives the appearance of a solution to that puzzle, claim that some sort of problem solving intelligence is evident.

I don't think our research paper on the intelligence of gum would go over very well. Even if we cleverly found a situation in which the characteristics of gum solved a baffling problem, it would probably be just too much for us to chew on.

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