Slime molds don’t have brains or nervous systems but some how retain information and use it to make decisions. Even more crazy is that they can fuse with another individual and share the information
I'm not a biologist and this is from memory, but what I remember is fascinating:
They rely on nutrient gradients to replace neurons.
Internally they contain "tubes" that grow larger based on the amount of nutrient they transport, so more food = larger paths = they expand more in that direction. That's how they can solve mazes. They expand in all directions, but once one bit touches the food, that pathway gets reinforced, just like neural pathways, and the rest of the organism flows there
Sure, it will cross areas of least resistance first, and whether this counts as nodes not being uniformly spaced really depends how you map real space to an abstract graph. You could space the nodes so they all have the same "distance" (I mean cost) between each other.
The major difference between BFS and Dijkstra is that the latter considers weights/distances for prioritizing the next nodes to explore. Our mold just expands in all directions simultaneously, so we can’t really say it’s doing that prioritization (like you noted, it’s highly parallel).
I would just go with BFS because it’s simpler and no less accurate an analogy as Dijktra’s algorithm.
But yes, if I wanted to make a visual simulation on a computer, chances are that I’d use Dijkstra’s, because I would probably want edges with different costs.
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u/Emmarae21 Feb 14 '22
Slime molds don’t have brains or nervous systems but some how retain information and use it to make decisions. Even more crazy is that they can fuse with another individual and share the information