tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-15453937.post5156897077315867697..comments2024-01-10T17:36:15.040-07:00Comments on The Lippard Blog: Seeing like a slime moldLippardhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16826768452963498005noreply@blogger.comBlogger5125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-15453937.post-8677381661394859552010-02-22T18:46:37.947-07:002010-02-22T18:46:37.947-07:00The UK paper is availble at arxiv.org, for free.
...The UK paper is availble at <a href="http://arxiv.org/abs/0912.3967" rel="nofollow">arxiv.org</a>, for free.<br /><br />The Japanese paper is at the web page for <a href="http://www.sciencemag.org/cgi/content/full/327/5964/439" rel="nofollow">Science</a> magazine, but it's per pay. However, the key sentence from the abstract says it all<br /><br /><i>We show that the slime mold Physarum polycephalum forms networks with comparable efficiency, fault tolerance, and cost to those of real-world infrastructure networks—in this case, the Tokyo rail system</i><br /><br />Comparable efficiency is not the same as identical.Alexhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/08561946313056153729noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-15453937.post-33572794227727962712010-02-21T16:10:05.407-07:002010-02-21T16:10:05.407-07:00The previous comment has been reposted on the rele...The previous comment has been reposted on <a href="http://lippard.blogspot.com/2007/03/rich-writer-poor-thinker.html" rel="nofollow">the relevant blog post</a> (from 2007).Lippardhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/16826768452963498005noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-15453937.post-22399482216603161622010-02-21T15:46:24.555-07:002010-02-21T15:46:24.555-07:00This comment has been removed by a blog administrator.KingPonghttps://www.blogger.com/profile/17916804982835177129noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-15453937.post-70059443686599511732010-02-21T10:57:48.143-07:002010-02-21T10:57:48.143-07:00Alex: Did you look at the published articles? I o...Alex: Did you look at the published articles? I only read the second-hand reports that I linked to. From your description, it sounds like not very good science--are they really just making subjective visual comparisons?<br /><br />One of the articles suggested they planned to add topographic features, which would add some more real-life constraint to the model.<br /><br />Given your descriptions, the slime mold cases gave me a good title but not good evidence. The sorts of claims Jared Diamond makes about geographical features in _Guns, Germs, and Steel_ would be a similar kind of evidence--some historians find his work to inappropriately attribute "agency" to non-humans, but that seems to me to be a mistaken notion of the term "agency."Lippardhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/16826768452963498005noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-15453937.post-74359868164585243042010-02-20T18:34:02.848-07:002010-02-20T18:34:02.848-07:00The slime moulds didn't really "duplicate...The slime moulds didn't really "duplicate" the real Tokyo maps, and reading this paper, neither did the UK maps.<br /><br />In order to compare them, they first looked at the maps, and ignore where the real railway lines/motorways were, instead they just drew straight lines between each node - this makes what mathematicians call a graph, not to be confused with a chart, which is what everyone else thinks of.<br /><br />They after each slime mould run, they would do the same. Then then would compare the two graphs.<br /><br />The details of each map could vary considerably, with the real world having obstacles to avoid like rivers and mountains, and the slime moulds having their own variations.<br /><br />However, even though they threw out all the details, and concentrated on the links, there wasn't really a good match. In the UK example, the best they could do was the real life graph was a sub-graph of the slime mould.<br /><br />Now, back to the 'how unlikely is this'.<br /><br />If you have a limited number of nodes, and a small number of connections between them, then you are going to get a graph which looks kinda like a road or rail network. The only other possibilities are either really unlikely (like a circular route where every node has links to exactly 2 other nodes), or eliminated by the rules, such as linking every node to every other node.<br /><br />It's really just another example of pareidolia.Alexhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/08561946313056153729noreply@blogger.com