English speaking international-What humans can learn from
semi-intelligent slime
Heather Barnett:
What
humans can learn from semi-intelligent slime
TEDSalon Berlin 2014 · 12:11 · Filmed Jun 2014
Subtitles available in 14 languages
Transcript
0:11
I'd like to introduce you to an organism: a
slime mold, Physarum polycephalum. It's a mold with an identity crisis, because
it's not a mold, so let's get that straight to start with. It is one of 700
known slime molds belonging to the kingdom of the amoeba. It is a single-celled
organism, a cell, that joins together with other cells to form a mass
super-cell to maximize its resources. So within a slime mold you might find
thousands or millions of nuclei, all sharing a cell wall, all operating as one
entity. In its natural habitat, you might find the slime mold foraging in
woodlands, eating rotting vegetation, but you might equally find it in research
laboratories, classrooms, and even artists' studios.
1:01
I first came across the slime mold about five
years ago. A microbiologist friend of mine gave me a petri dish with a little
yellow blob in it and told me to go home and play with it. The only
instructions I was given, that it likes it dark and damp and its favorite food
is porridge oats. I'm an artist who's worked for many years with biology, with
scientific processes, so living material is not uncommon for me. I've worked
with plants, bacteria, cuttlefish, fruit flies. So I was keen to get my new
collaborator home to see what it could do. So I took it home and I watched. I
fed it a varied diet. I observed as it networked. It formed a connection
between food sources. I watched it leave a trail behind it, indicating where it
had been. And I noticed that when it was fed up with one petri dish, it would
escape and find a better home.
1:56
I captured my observations through time-lapse
photography. Slime mold grows at about one centimeter an hour, so it's not
really ideal for live viewing unless there's some form of really extreme
meditation, but through the time lapse, I could observe some really interesting
behaviors. For instance, having fed on a nice pile of oats, the slime mold goes
off to explore new territories in different directions simultaneously. When it
meets itself, it knows it's already there, it recognizes it's there, and
instead retreats back and grows in other directions. I was quite impressed by
this feat, at how what was essentially just a bag of cellular slime could
somehow map its territory, know itself, and move with seeming intention.
2:48
I found countless scientific studies, research
papers, journal articles, all citing incredible work with this one organism,
and I'm going to share a few of those with you. For example, a team in Hokkaido
University in Japan filled a maze with slime mold. It joined together and
formed a mass cell. They introduced food at two points, oats of course, and it
formed a connection between the food. It retracted from empty areas and dead
ends. There are four possible routes through this maze, yet time and time
again, the slime mold established the shortest and the most efficient route.
Quite clever. The conclusion from their experiment was that the slime mold had
a primitive form of intelligence. Another study exposed cold air at regular
intervals to the slime mold. It didn't like it. It doesn't like it cold. It
doesn't like it dry. They did this at repeat intervals, and each time, the
slime mold slowed down its growth in response. However, at the next interval,
the researchers didn't put the cold air on, yet the slime mold slowed down in
anticipation of it happening. It somehow knew that it was about the time for
the cold air that it didn't like. The conclusion from their experiment was that
the slime mold was able to learn. A third experiment: the slime mold was
invited to explore a territory covered in oats. It fans out in a branching
pattern. As it goes, each food node it finds, it forms a network, a connection
to, and keeps foraging. After 26 hours, it established quite a firm network
between the different oats. Now there's nothing remarkable in this until you
learn that the center oat that it started from represents the city of Tokyo,
and the surrounding oats are suburban railway stations. The slime mold had
replicated the Tokyo transport network — (Laughter) — a complex system
developed over time by community dwellings, civil engineering, urban planning.
What had taken us well over 100 years took the slime mold just over a day. The
conclusion from their experiment was that the slime mold can form efficient
networks and solve the traveling salesman problem.
5:04
It is a biological computer. As
such, it has been mathematically modeled, algorithmically analyzed. It's been
sonified, replicated, simulated. World over, teams of researchers are decoding
its biological principles to understand its computational rules and applying
that learning to the fields of electronics, programming and robotics.
5:26
So the question is, how does this
thing work? It doesn't have a central nervous system. It doesn't have a brain,
yet it can perform behaviors that we associate with brain function. It can
learn, it can remember, it can solve problems, it can make decisions. So where
does that intelligence lie? So this is a microscopy, a video I shot, and it's
about 100 times magnification, sped up about 20 times, and inside the slime
mold, there is a rhythmic pulsing flow, a vein-like structure carrying cellular
material, nutrients and chemical information through the cell, streaming first
in one direction and then back in another. And it is this continuous,
synchronous oscillation within the cell that allows it to form quite a complex
understanding of its environment, but without any large-scale control center.
This is where its intelligence lies.
6:24
So it's not just academic
researchers in universities that are interested in this organism. A few years
ago, I set up SliMoCo, the Slime Mould Collective. It's an online, open,
democratic network for slime mold researchers and enthusiasts to share
knowledge and experimentation across disciplinary divides and across academic
divides. The Slime Mould Collective membership is self-selecting. People have
found the collective as the slime mold finds the oats. And it comprises of
scientists and computer scientists and researchers but also artists like me,
architects, designers, writers, activists, you name it. It's a very
interesting, eclectic membership. Just a few examples: an artist who paints
with fluorescent Physarum; a collaborative team who are combining biological
and electronic design with 3D printing technologies in a workshop; another
artist who is using the slime mold as a way of engaging a community to map
their area. Here, the slime mold is being used directly as a biological tool,
but metaphorically as a symbol for ways of talking about social cohesion,
communication and cooperation. Other public engagement activities, I run lots
of slime mold workshops, a creative way of engaging with the organism. So
people are invited to come and learn about what amazing things it can do, and
they design their own petri dish experiment, an environment for the slime mold
to navigate so they can test its properties. Everybody takes home a new pet and
is invited to post their results on the Slime Mould Collective. And the
collective has enabled me to form collaborations with a whole array of interesting
people. I've been working with filmmakers on a feature-length slime mold
documentary, and I stress feature-length, which is in the final stages of edit
and will be hitting your cinema screens very soon. (Laughter)
8:33
It's also enabled me to conduct what I think
is the world's first human slime mold experiment. This is part of an exhibition
in Rotterdam last year. We invited people to become slime mold for half an
hour. So we essentially tied people together so they were a giant cell, and
invited them to follow slime mold rules. You have to communicate through
oscillations, no speaking. You have to operate as one entity, one mass cell, no
egos, and the motivation for moving and then exploring the environment is in
search of food. So a chaotic shuffle ensued as this bunch of strangers tied
together with yellow ropes wearing "Being Slime Mold" t-shirts
wandered through the museum park. When they met trees, they had to reshape
their connections and reform as a mass cell through not speaking. This is a ludicrous
experiment in many, many ways. This isn't hypothesis-driven. We're not trying
to prove, demonstrate anything. But what it did provide us was a way of
engaging a broad section of the public with ideas of intelligence, agency,
autonomy, and provide a playful platform for discussions about the things that
ensued. One of the most exciting things about this experiment was the
conversation that happened afterwards. An entirely spontaneous symposium
happened in the park. People talked about the human psychology, of how
difficult it was to let go of their individual personalities and egos. Other
people talked about bacterial communication. Each person brought in their own
individual interpretation, and our conclusion from this experiment was that the
people of Rotterdam were highly cooperative, especially when given beer. We
didn't just give them oats. We gave them beer as well.
10:38
But they weren't as efficient as the slime
mold, and the slime mold, for me, is a fascinating subject matter. It's
biologically fascinating, it's computationally interesting, but it's also a
symbol, a way of engaging with ideas of community, collective behavior,
cooperation. A lot of my work draws on the scientific research, so this pays
homage to the maze experiment but in a different way. And the slime mold is
also my working material. It's a coproducer of photographs, prints, animations,
participatory events. Whilst the slime mold doesn't choose to work with me,
exactly, it is a collaboration of sorts. I can predict certain behaviors by
understanding how it operates, but I can't control it. The slime mold has the
final say in the creative process. And after all, it has its own internal
aesthetics. These branching patterns that we see we see across all forms,
scales of nature, from river deltas to lightning strikes, from our own blood
vessels to neural networks. There's clearly significant rules at play in this
simple yet complex organism, and no matter what our disciplinary perspective or
our mode of inquiry, there's a great deal that we can learn from observing and
engaging with this beautiful, brainless blob.
11:59
I give you Physarum polycephalum.
12:03
Thank you.
12:04
(Applause)
ludicrous ■ adjective so foolish or unreasonable as to be
amusing; absurd or ridiculous.
■
adj ● ရယ္ဖြယ္ျဖစ္ေသာ။ သဘာဝမက်ေသာ။
အဓိပၸာယ္မရိွေသာ။ မျဖစ္ႏိုင္ေသာ။ a ludicrous idea/situation. o ludicrously adv ၾကည့္မေကာင္း
႐ႈမေကာင္း။ ludicrously tight trousers.
- ensue ■ v ● အက်ဳိးဆက္ျဖစ္ေပၚသည္။ ရလဒ္ေပၚထြက္
သည္။ Chaos/Panic ensued. m in the ensuing (ie following) years.
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