Slime Mold Wonders

This slime mold video is a great example of simple rules leading to complex behaviour. The slime mold doesn't think - it just iterates a few simple rules over and over again and ends up with a very efficient way of 'exploring' its environment and optimizing that exploration. Look at what happens and if you are amazed and wonderstruck, YouTube provides many other compelling glimpses of slime molds in action. While we like images of soaring eagles, dedicated exploration teams, last-second goals and cute polar bears on shrinking ice-floes, "slime mould" isn't likely to figure in any corporate story-telling. "Hi, we're the R&D guys and we use slime molds to solve our engineering problems." Still, an interesting phenomena worth contemplating.

This post from Aid on the Edge of Chaos is definitely worth reading. The connections between slime mold, civil engineering, public policy and aid is a great run through the complexity theory landscape. Here is the post - Slime Mold, Simple Rules and the Politics of Self-Organisation.

WIRED has a good article on the Tokyo transportation experiment and great images to go with it. You can see it here.