Mushroom learns to crawl after being given robot body (2024) | Hacker News Reader

Mushroom learns to crawl after being given robot body (2024)

the-independent.com

176 pointsAnon8470 comments

This seems to be one of the researches from Organic Robotics Lab at Cornell Univ.

https://orl.mae.cornell.edu/

https://news.cornell.edu/stories/2024/08/biohybrid-robots-co...

I believe that "learn" is a bit too strong word here. The fungi is essentially a UV light sensor. The researchers made a robot that moves in a certain way based on the biological signal.

So the mushroom is more like a passive sensor then an active pilot.

It can be firing in arbitrary banner and we’ll still call it movement. Like the LLM does random and lossy decompression and we give it context and meaning…

cloudbonsai disputed the word "learned", and you countered by validating the word "movement". A completely orthogonal argument.

I’m skeptical that the mushroom is in any way “learning to crawl”. It looks more like the mushroom naturally produces signals in response to light, and the robot triggers a walk cycle when it sees that signal.

As a fungophile who spends way too much time crawling around in the woods looking for mushrooms, I think fungus learned to crawl before we did.

I find that claim interesting, especially given your background in studying fungus. Could you expand on it a bit?

Slime molds are super interesting and are able to find optimal paths for resource management. Slime molds have been used to model and improve traffic flow for humans.

https://phys.org/news/2022-01-virtual-slime-mold-subway-netw...

I would call this action "crawling" and I am sure predates mammals. Or dinosaurs. Or plants.

Slime molds aren’t fungus, though…

> Slime molds are classified within the Kingdom Protista, and are more closely related to amoebas and certain seaweeds than to fungi, plants, or animals.

Not a true fungi; today I learned. Thanks!

If you take a small plot of wild land, say 50'x50' and visit it everyday watching all the various mushrooms which will grow there (there will be far more then most people realize or expect) and try and find the sense in where and when they fruit it becomes difficult to write it all off as simple biological responses to environment/following the food/etc, and even if you do look at it that way and start adding up the possible causes and effects you can end up with such a long list that it becomes difficult to not see it as some sort of at least instinctual level intelligence and that the growth of mycelium often has more in common with crawling than mindless growth.

For example, many mushrooms are very good at fruiting just out of sight from trails, walk 20' off the trail, turn around and suddenly you start seeing mushrooms. Instinct is to say that all the mushrooms which grow within sight of the trail get picked by curious people or kicked by children but if you start looking for remains and stumps and mushrumps and those hard to spot just starting to fruit immature buttons, you find surprisingly few. So you think environmental, the trail alters windflow and runoff, animal movement, etc, but than you notice that this is true of even those small trails created by a fox or children which only affect a bit of low growing undergrowth so only has a tiny effect on a very localized area. On and on it goes until you run out of explanations.

I am mostly convinced there is some level of intelligence here and we just can not see it because it is so very different from what we understand as intelligence. But, I may just spend too much time with mushrooms, during the season I always seem to have at least a dozen various mushrooms which I will visit everyday to watch them grow and rot away.

great read: https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S187861462...

fungi has memory and can decide to not grow on a previous hostile enviroment/direction

edit: i'm skeptical about the fantastic type of journalism title. the paper points on using fungi electrical reactions to light to drive a robot, not the the otherwise, even less the fungi understanding a "robot" and using it. despite them showing spatial perception on studies about their capabilities

What the article says is that fungi produces electrical spikes and those spikes may encode information and function like a primitive language to coordinate activity across the network.

But what if the environment was never hostile and they still avoid it? Some research hints that fungi can react to vibration, like stimuli, but there's no solid proof that mushrooms avoid trails because of it. Still, it feels worth investigating.

Looks like they respond to their environment in complex ways. What if mushrooms avoid trails because they feel the vibrations? Maybe they learned that foot traffic = danger. So it grows out of reach.

You should explore this theory and run some field studies.

Avoiding the trails can generally explained in fairly simple ways; trail lets in more sunlight so ground near the trail is drier, soil of trails are often heavily compacted which means very dry and hard with very wet and soft on either side from rain water run off, trails funnel air flow down them which affects the moisture levels in the air and soil, etc. The thing here is their knack for growing out of sight of the trail, which is not just a distance thing, many mushrooms are far from inconspicuous and can be seen from a good distance but seem to be able to find those places where they won't be noticed even when growing near a trail.

So you look at a particular mushroom's requirements for fruiting and look to see how those are met by the place they are growing and try and try to figure out why they fruited in just that spot but not 5 feet over offers the exact same conditions other than that spot 5 feet over being more visible from the trail. On the larger well traveled trails it is fairly easy to find possible explanations, that spot which is not visible from the trail is often the spot protected from how the trail affects airflow/sunlight but things get less clear on the small less traveled trails which have a minimal affect on the local environment.

You can generally explain away everything with simple biological responses but often it requires quite a few and their all being informed by the others, not just acting in isolation, and at that point it starts looking like some level of intelligence. I am always amazed by the number and variety of mushrooms you find once you leave the trail and you don't even have to go far, 5 or 10 feet is often all it takes.

Unlikely I will ever do any sort of field study, I am perfectly content with just watching them grow and not having all the answers.

I like that you saw this with your own eyes and noticed things that are hard to explain rather than just reading about it and settling for someone else's hypothesis. Thanks for sharing!

Off topic but my dad took me around the woods this weekend to show me mushrooms and he almost couldn’t contain his excitement. And this is a person who usually doesn’t like stuff. And the whole time I was like “yep, that’s a mushroom”. There’s clearly something fascinating about the hobby that I don’t get (yet). Curious to hear your take.

Your dad sounds like a good sort. I have no idea how to explain the mushroom fascination that some of us have to those that lack it and have mostly learned to just not talk about mushrooms with people who don't have the fascination.

Another "fun" science trick here[0] demo here[1]

[0]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Necrobotics

[1]https://www.youtube.com/shorts/_7LUszWRqco

> Besides the necrobotic spider gripper, there are no other robotic concepts under the necrobotics subfield.

Does dead trout swimming upstream not count? doi:10.1017/S0022112005007925 (open access link: https://www.liaolab.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/10/2006Beal_...)

Has science gone too far, or not far enough? Surely there are business opportunities for reanimating the dead bodies of animals! Where is the mouse jiggler made from an actual dead mouse being controlled by a Raspberry Pi? Or the carcass of a dead dog controlled by an air bladder that will lurch from behind your shrubs and snap at a prowler using zigbee and connected to your security system?

The Mechanicum will follow your career with much interest. ;)

Not sure about this particular experiment, but there is certainly interesting potential in integrating biological organisms (or parts thereof) with larger robotic and mechanical systems.

Recently I saw a video of a turtle which was given a skateboard. It quickly learned how to zip around the house, chasing the cat, etc. It was a simple demostration of how technology, even as primitive as the wheel, can augment the abilities of an organism - especially a living being with sensors (eyes) and neural network (brain).

It also reminds me of the goldfish in a bowl, attached to a small motorized vehicle, which was given the ability to navigate it by swimming in different directions. It soon learned to use this system as an extension of its body, exploring the house, bumping into things like a Roomba with a live brain.

Suppose it's in the same field of exploration as those super-soldiers with Gundam-style body suits and computerized helmets projecting a live data feed to their retinas, maybe eventually embedding neural connectors directly in the head.

Regarding the turtle and the goldfish, how can we really say these animals learned how to operate these things? I’m not sure I’d be able to tell the difference between a goldfish just swimming around the tank like normal versus one swimming around the tank with intention.

I assume a fish that didn’t understand what was going on would just run into walls? Or at most just move towards lights?

The top-level comment indeed says that the fish was bumping into things like a Roomba, so I’m also skeptical....

judge for yourself https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2nhp7U0rwdM

Oh that's a more proper study than the amateur experiment I saw.

> For this purpose, we trained goldfish to use a Fish Operated Vehicle (FOV), a wheeled terrestrial platform that reacts to the fish’s movement characteristics, location and orientation in its water tank to change the vehicle’s; i.e., the water tank’s, position in the arena.

> The fish were tasked to “drive” the FOV towards a visual target in the terrestrial environment, which was observable through the walls of the tank, and indeed were able to operate the vehicle, explore the new environment, and reach the target regardless of the starting point, all while avoiding dead-ends and correcting location inaccuracies.

From fish out of water to new insights on navigation mechanisms in animals - https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S01664...

lets start working our beliefs up from easier places :

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RZ_0ImDYrPY

https://www.youtube.com/shorts/7H2IDc-5QdQ

You’ll need to watch the video of the turtle. It was actively chasing a cat around, so it definitely knew what it was doing.

Tiny Turtle Follows Cat On a Skateboard - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bVbtAYPSapw

Also see Project Pigeon: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project_Pigeon

Good ol' B.F. Skinner. Apparently the idea was pretty solid but he had trouble getting people to take it seriously.

I'm getting a bit of a skroderider[0] feeling.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Fire_Upon_the_Deep#Skroders/...

Came here for this.

This combo reminds me of a character in a recent anime called Scavengers Reign.

https://www.wikiwand.com/en/articles/Scavengers_Reign

This limited series blew my mind. Total master piece.

In favor of integrating fungus with robotics(i think).

erm acktually not an anime

What could possibly go wrong?

Or right? Reminds me of the Skroderider species of sentient seaweed from Vernor Vinge's "A Fire Upon the Deep".

I came here to say this!

I, for one, welcome our new fungal overlords!

Reminds me of:

https://www.syfy.com/syfy-wire/fish-control-vehicles-and-nav...

Rats too!! :)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mYHMc3-f3v8

Not an expert on fungi, or the kinddom in general, but slime molds have been found to do some amazing things. https://www.nature.com/articles/nature.2012.11811

I would guess you could achieve similar results with a rat's or cat's brain, but I wonder at which point ethical dilemmas start creeping in. When the fungi learns to ask for food, perhaps?

Perhaps you are wholly unaware of our past history of experimentation on living rats.

Here I thought ST Discovery had jumped the shark with its whole mycelium navigation plot device.

Oh, that's still true.

Before you know it will have a mushroom brain.

“Autobiography of a human, or how mushrooms learned to build computers after being given primate bodies”

And I, for one, welcome our new mushroom overlords.

slashdot is that way, friend -> https://slashdot.org

Anybody else find this creepy?

Very creepy however it is living proof that Trump is real and not CGI.

A real liar.

Just don't give them six wheels! Hexapodia is the key insight!

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