Slime mold grows network just like Tokyo rail system
wired.com
wired.com
The environment provided for the slime molds doesn't seem to record mountains and lakes etc, so they can't be expected to choose the same system.
When we find that engineers and nature have arrived at similar solutions, I think it's the engineers that we should marvel at.
Even soap bubbles organize themselves to minimize surface area. http://www.soapbubble.dk/en/bubbles/geometry.php and apparently Centuries ago, architects discovered that experimenting with soap bubbles could help them define the most economical form for the actual structure. http://www.encyclopedia.com/doc/1G2-3407500197.html
Although as so often happens, the first submission sinks without a trace, a subsequent duplicate submission gets an upvote on the "newest" page, makes it to the front page and thereby gets noticed generally. This is one argument to suggest why the duplication detection algorithm should not be tightened significantly - if a link has any real merit, and it's news rather than something old that someone has run across, then it has several chances of not being missed, becuase it will get submitted several times.
Earlier submissions of the same story also sank (mostly) without trace:
It does already. If submit a url that is already there, it gives it an automatic upvote.
It's this just a variant on the shortest path problem. Even a bad solution is going to look similar to a real rail network. There are plenty of good, easy algorithms to solve this, much faster than waiting a day for slime to grow.
Confused as to how this got in Science & Wired. What am I missing (I didn't read the Science report, so maybe there's something there?)
Saying things are obvious after they've happened is 100% useless. Demonstrating you have the mental models to say these things predictively is pretty exciting, though.
If you can do that, go become a scientist. Use those models. Publish papers. You'll get into Science, too.
Hey, that's like how brains mature!
Any references to the work on using slime to mimic the UK rail network that you mentioned? The best I could find was the following from http://www.springerlink.com/content/7tw4745823645128/
"In practical terms such a process may also be witnessed in the evolution of real infrastructure networks, such as British railways following the Beeching reviews in the early '60s [8,9]. In these reviews, the flux along various routes was measured and routes with too low a level of traffic, mainly branch lines, were targeted for closure. At the same time, major routes were strengthened to cope with the expected source-sink relationships for both passenger and freight traffic. Interestingly, the reports focussed on efficient rather than any explicit consideration of resilience, which may explain the sensitivity of the current UK rail network to disruption."
Where: [8] British Railways Board: The development of the major railway trunk routes (1965) [9] British Transport Commission: The reshaping of british railways - part 1: report (1963)
My, that was a yummy slime mold!