the timboucher experience

Maybe this article just appeals to me because I’m currently reading Philip K. Dick’s Clans of the Alphane Moon, which features both a characters who is a slime mold from Ganymede, and another who is an android:

For the first time, signals generated by a living cell have resulted in the locomotion of a six-legged robot, report Soichiro Tsuda and Yukio-Pegio Gunji from Kobe University in Japan and Klaus-Peter Zauner from the University of Southampton, United Kingdom.

In the long run, the coupling of cells and machines could lead to hybrid robots with the flexibility to adapt to unforeseen situations that arise in complex environments — a quality that is extremely difficult to program into a computer but is demonstrated in every living organism.

“I think Zauner and Gunji have made the first step to creating a robo-cop,” said Andrew Adamatzky, professor in unconventional computing at the University of the West of England [...]

In nature, slime molds thrive in dark, moist places. If exposed to the sun or some other repulsive stimuli, the mold will move, amoeba-like, to the nearest shady, damp place.

This behavior is linked to oscillations of thickness in the cell. For example, when a region of the cell senses an appealing condition, such as moisture or warmth, it will oscillate faster. If a region senses something unappealing, such as light, it will oscillate slower.

It’s these oscillations that the team captured and converted into leg motion on the robot.

Freaky times ahead - that’s for sure.

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