Slime moulds, on the other hand, can solve NP hard problems in linear time.
There's a LOT of really cool untapped potential in biological computing. I just wish we had a social framework we could trust to develop it ethically and use it benignly.
TBH, for many NP-hard problems algorithms exist that "almost" solve those problems, giving an answer that is at worst several times worse than optimal, and slime moulds use the same approach.
True, it's not like P == NP under whatever paradigm the slime mould's using, but it's heuristic is a lot better than our state of the art a lot of the time and it's expensive enough to simulate that it'd sometimes be worth getting an actual slime mould in a lab on a custom lattice instead of trying to book 1000 supercomputer hours or whatever, which is extremely cool.
Slime moulds, on the other hand, can solve NP hard problems in linear time.
There's a LOT of really cool untapped potential in biological computing. I just wish we had a social framework we could trust to develop it ethically and use it benignly.
Yeah, the soviets used analog computers to create NP-hard heuristics in similar way.
TBH, for many NP-hard problems algorithms exist that "almost" solve those problems, giving an answer that is at worst several times worse than optimal, and slime moulds use the same approach.
True, it's not like P == NP under whatever paradigm the slime mould's using, but it's heuristic is a lot better than our state of the art a lot of the time and it's expensive enough to simulate that it'd sometimes be worth getting an actual slime mould in a lab on a custom lattice instead of trying to book 1000 supercomputer hours or whatever, which is extremely cool.