Engineers Gave a Mushroom a Robot Body and Let It Run Wild

sciencealert.com

This certainly seems like it might be an interesting result, but the title is clickbaity.

Whatever that contraption is, it isn't running wild, and it isn't even exhibiting anything that resembles what we normally think of a "running". The jerking of its limbs that we see is just an oscillation (and apparently a very chaotic one) that seems to be biased towards movement in a certain direction.

That's all. This thing isn't "running" in any meaningful sense.

Seems like the article doesn’t explain what’s going on in the video, right?

Anyone have a sense for what’s happening?

UV light tends to kill fungi, so it seems like they are stressing the fungus and then trying to condition the signals they get from the fungus to create a directed motion. Essentially using the fungus as a UV detector and simple form of logic. They did not, for example, let the fungus vehicles wander randomly, seeking moisture and better soil to see what the fungus desired, though that might be an eventual goal, a sort of environmental sensor. That's my guess.

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