Rethinking Intelligence: Insights From Brainless Slime Mold

The article discusses the remarkable problem-solving abilities of Physarum polycephalum, a yellow slime mold found in Japanese forests. Despite lacking neurons or a brain, this single-celled organism can solve complex optimization problems that challenge sophisticated human algorithms. In experiments, it recreated the Tokyo railway system's efficiency by connecting food sources, solving mazes, and replicating highway systems through decentralized decision-making processes using chemical and electrical signals. The slime mold demonstrates risk assessment capabilities, anticipatory behavior, and even memory—it can predict recurring environmental conditions and transfer this knowledge to other colonies. These abilities have inspired innovations in computer science, urban planning, and quantum computing, with slime mold-inspired algorithms outperforming traditional network optimization and transportation planning approaches. The organism's intelligence challenges anthropocentric views of cognition and suggests intelligence may be substrate-independent, evolutionary efficient, and distributed rather than centralized.

https://www.ihadnoclue.com/article/1108582022938132481