Under the general routine of video games, the stupid slime is always the lowest level monster.
They have almost no IQ to speak of, and their attack methods are single and they are always known for their mobile skills, which is the so-called "mud can't support the wall".
Looking at the various types of slimes, the vast majority of them appear in a low-end form of irregular slime.
In addition, slime originally meant slime in English, which originally referred to mud or viscous liquid secreted by animals.
Although all this is reminiscent of slugs at first, the "slime" in the real world is far from simple.
The prototype of slime is a less common organism, Slime mold.
Its positioning in nature can be described as extremely strange.
Biologists have a headache for a long time just by thinking about "which kind of organism to classify them into."
First of all, slime molds are eukaryotes, not mucus bacteria.
And their lives also have two very different forms.
During the growth or trophic phase, they are bare cell-wall-free protoplasmic masses, also known as the "metamorphic phase".
The nutritional structure, movement and feeding patterns at this stage are similar to those of protozoa such as amoeba.
Because active motor feeding is a characteristic of animals, some biologists believe that they should belong to protozoa.
However, unlike protozoa, slime molds have a "collective consciousness" that protozoa cannot match.
When there is a shortage of food around them, they will send a signal to summon the surrounding slime molds to gradually gather together.
In this way, the slime molds slowly merge into a large clump of "slimes", and the cooperative movement collects the surrounding food.
However, once the breeding period comes, they change their form and behave more like fungi.
This stage is also known as the "fruiting body stage", where the slime mold will slowly grow into a mushroom shape and gradually harden and dry out.
Finally, countless spores with fibrous cell walls are born and reproduce sexually.
Therefore, other biologists believe that slime mold should be regarded as a fungus.
Immature stages of child entities
So later, biologists can only classify these "four unlike" organisms directly into the protist realm ( Protist ) , which belongs to the slime mold phylum.
Taxonomy is a total of five boundaries, so some people describe such classifications as "dedicated to everything we don't really know."
It's general, but at least it can't go wrong.
But their most bizarre place is not here.
Because as a single-celled organism, the intelligence they exhibit is unimaginable.
More than three decades ago, when biologists first brought slime molds into the lab, they found that the way they moved was different.
Not only do they walk mazes, they have the ability to learn, and they can even simulate the layout of artificial transportation networks.
In just a few hours, they can accomplish what a bunch of top engineers have been doing for decades, and are known as "the world's smallest road planners."
And all of this is based on the premise that this lump of slimes has no nervous system and no brain.
Yellow slime molds are under siege
The wisdom of slime molds first received the attention of scientists, starting with a famous labyrinth experiment in Japan.
In 2000, Nakagaki and other scientists set up such an interesting way of playing.
They cultured the slime mold in a normal maze, and at the beginning and end of the maze, some oats were placed.
Because in the laboratory, oats are the favorite food of slime molds.
In the maze, there are 4 routes of different lengths that can be connected to these two food sources.
At the beginning of the experiment, the researchers found that slime molds stretch their own cytoplasm, covering almost the entire surface of the maze.
And this Ecstasy Gossip Array did not hinder their original "gluttonous" impulses at all.
As soon as they find food, they begin to slowly retract the excess, ending up with only the shortest path left.
No matter how many times the experiment was repeated, the slime molds seemed to have discussed it, and they always did not hesitate to choose the path that consumed the least amount of energy and could get food.
AG is the starting and ending point, and the white line is the shortest path
If you think that walking mazes is not great, it doesn't matter, they have stronger housekeeping skills.
Because the road conditions are innumerable times more complex than the maze, it is difficult for them to find the "optimal solution".
With this experimental basis in place, the same researchers tested the slime molds in a different way in 2004.
They intended to place multiple food sources on a free plane to see if the slime molds could still find the optimal path for foraging.
In the end, the slime mold did live up to expectations. The network formed by connecting the points is almost the optimal path in the project.
Don't think that finding the optimal path is simple, and there can be extremely complex combination optimization problems involved.
In fact, just taking the optimal path between the three points can already make people tangled for a while.
Imagine yourself as the lump of slimes, the cereal that makes you salivate on the ABC three.
In the long run, what kind of lines should you build to ensure that you consume the least amount of energy and eat all these cereals?
Yellow is a herringbone line, and black is a circular line
Presumably, everyone already knows that this is the problem of connecting three points to find the least sum of distances in middle school.
And students who believe that the response is fast should also see that they only need to take a little in the middle of the ABC three points to connect the three places, and the herringbone line formed is the shortest.
But the problem is that this herringbone route, as long as it is casually disconnected, is equivalent to a piece of cereal can not be eaten.
Considering this situation, we have to choose a different method of connectivity to be more reasonable.
For example, the three points of the ABC are directly connected to form a circular line.
In this way, although the distance is a little longer, even if one line is broken, the other two lines can still connect three points without losing any oats.
In fact, the herringbone route corresponds to the solution to the "Steiner tree problem", that is, the shortest path loop required to connect the points.
The shape of the route corresponds to the "traveling merchant problem", to find the fastest way to return to the original position through each point.
If you extend the original 3 points to 4, 5, 6... or n points, the complexity of the problem will increase exponentially.
So it's not hard to imagine how difficult it is to design a transportation network in the real world.
The real strength of slime molds is that they can take into account all aspects of the situation.
What they are looking for is not the shortest, but the best.
Nakagaki
In 2004, Nakagaki and his team used up to 7 food sources in the lab to test the path planning ability of slime molds.
After statistical analysis, the researchers showed that the route planned by slime molds almost meets the multiple requirements of the intelligent network, and is the optimal path sought by the "traveling merchant problem" or the "Steiner tree problem".
However, paving the way on these 7 food sources is really a small CASE in the eyes of slime molds.
Scientists soon whimsically simulated the entire railway network in Japan's Tokyo area with slime molds.
The Tokyo Railway System is one of the most efficient and well-laid out systems in the world.
Even in the eyes of many experienced engineers, it takes a lot of brain cells to design it.
However, slime molds, a single-celled organism with no head at all, only need dozens of hours of crazy growth, and can repeat the painstaking efforts of top designers for decades.
First, the researchers created a large plate based on the outline of the surrounding area of Tokyo to limit the range of slime molds.
In addition, according to the light-avoidance characteristics of slime molds, local lighting is used to simulate the surrounding coastline and terrain.
Because the real railway network is hindered by hills, lakes or terrain.
Higher grayscale means weaker light intensity
Then, the largest piece of oatmeal is placed in the center of the container, corresponding to the location of Tokyo Station.
Other small pieces of oats are scattered in containers corresponding to 35 stations on the Tokyo Railway.
After this is set up, it can basically simulate the actual situation in the area.
Next, it depends on the performance of the slime molds.
At first, slime molds will try to cover as much plane as possible, constantly exploring new territories.
But after a dozen hours, the slime mold seemed to have a slight understanding and began to optimize the layout.
For example, the pipe between oats will continue to strengthen, while some less useful paths will gradually retract and disappear.
After about 26 hours, these slime molds formed a vein that was highly similar to the railway network in the Tokyo area. This is almost a replica of the Tokyo Railway, and even more resilient than the Tokyo Railway.
In addition to this, the slime mold network is also highly self-healing. As soon as one of the food sources is removed, the entire practice network will be rearranged according to the previous "optimization" principles.
Therefore, scientists also believe that this intelligent performance of slime mold is applied in the design of transportation networks and in complex simulation experiments of large models.
The results of this experiment were published in the journal Scientece in 2010.
Also in the same year, this achievement also earned the research team the "Funny Nobel Prize in Transport Planning" for the same year.
Don't look at the funny Nobel Prize, but behind it can really cause us human beings to think deeply.
After all, this ability to calculate the most reasonable path is difficult for even computers to surpass.
But so far, how the brainless and nerveless slime molds complete this intelligent network is still an unsolved mystery.
Since the 21st century, they have also received great attention from biomimicry and artificial intelligence.
It is precisely because of the wisdom shown by "brainless" that people wonder whether this will be a key to opening the door of future artificial intelligence.
Alien juvenile form in Alien Awakening resembles a fruiting body of slime molds
Finally, it has to be said that the alien Calvin in the popular science fiction film "Alien Awakening" in 2017 was inspired by the intelligent slime mold - even if it has no brain, its intelligence still crushes humans.
So, in the future, don't use single cells or slimes to describe others stupid.
Because of this statement, it may also be praising him.
*References
Slime mold. Wikipedia.2018.04.01
Mcgonagall. Chewing gum that moves. Copernicus Wildlife. 2010.06.07
Toshiyuki Nakagaki, Hiroyasu Yamada & Ágota Tóth.Intelligence: Maze-solving by an amoeboid organism. Nature.2000.09.28.
Toshiyuki Nakagaki,HiroyasuYamada,MasahikoHara.Smart network solutions in an amoeboid organism. Science direct.2004.01.01.
Atsushi Tero1,2, Seiji Takagi1, Tetsu Saigusa3, Kentaro Ito1, Dan P.Bebber4, Mark D. Fricker.Rules for Biologically Inspired Adaptive Network Design.2010.01.22