Astronomical Algorithm Inspired by Slime Mold

Innovation: Academia

University of California Santa Cruz

2020

Image: Chen Liu / Unsplash / CC BY SA - Creative Commons Attribution + ShareAlike

Compute

Computation allows an organism to take in and process information to make decisions. Whether it be calculating how fast prey is moving or deciding where to build a nest, computation is an important part of an organism’s life.

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Navigate Through Air

Although free from many of the physical obstructions found on land and in water, organisms that move through the air must still avoid hitting each other and objects in their flight path, such as trees and mountains. They also need to navigate from one place to another, which presents a different challenge. They use one strategy to navigate around obstructions and another to move towards their destination. For example, bats use echolocation to detect both obstacles and prey. To navigate during migration, bats also use vision, sun orientation, and likely other strategies.

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Navigate Over Land

Organisms that navigate over land must avoid obstacles and find their way from one point to another. Because land lies at the interface of the ground and air, these organisms have the opportunity to use signals transmitted through both the ground or air, rather than relying on one potential source. To take advantage of this opportunity, these organisms must have strategies attuned to diverse signals, which may travel through multiple media. An example of an organism that navigates over land is a desert ant in Tunisia that senses smells from two different directions at once, forming a “mental map” of its surroundings.

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The Monte Carlo Physarum Machine from UC Santa Cruz is a computational algorithm that accurately predicts cosmic web formation using slime mold growth patterns.

Benefits

Improved accuracy
Improved predictability

Applications

Computer algorithms
Space exploration

UN Sustainable Development Goals Addressed

Goal 9: Industry Innovation & Infrastructure

The Challenge

The cosmic web connects galaxies together throughout the Universe. It occurred after the Big Bang, as the Universe was expanding and matter became distributed in a web-like network of interconnected filaments. Traditional representations of the cosmic web were created by computer simulations based on the distribution of matter, especially dark matter. Creating an accurate algorithm to predict cosmic web formation will allow us to map more distant galaxies, and eventually the whole Universe.

Innovation Details

The computer algorithm was inspired by the web-like networks a slime mold builds as it searches for food. The algorithm is based on the 2-dimensional Physarum model developed in 2010 by Jeff Jones. It has been modified to work in three dimensions and has been tested on a dataset of 37,000 galaxies from the Sloan Digital Sky Survey (SDSS), where it accurately replicated the results produced by dark matter-based algorithms. It has since been used to model a map of the cosmic web in the local Universe, within 100 million light-years of Earth.

Biological Model

The single-cell organism known as slime mold builds complex web-like filamentary networks in search of food, always finding near-optimal pathways to connect different locations, similar to cosmic webs found in outer space.

See Related Strategy

Spherical yellow bulbs grow out of a web of yellow slime, also known as physarum polycephalum

Biological Strategy

Brainless Slime Mold Creates Smart Networks

Physarum polycephalum slime mold

This single-celled organism creates efficient, resilient networks by constantly expanding and retracting in many directions.

References

Journal article

Revealing the Dark Threads of the Cosmic Web

The Astrophysical Journal Letters

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