👁️ autosurveillant 👁️ @pee_zombie@schelling.pt

and these other two, not sure what they are

also saw this polypore, looks like a ganoderma I think?

as luck would have it I ran into one of these guys later this same day

see the nodes connected by channels? that's an efficient nutrient transport network right therea
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RT @pee_zombie
thinking about how the explore/exploit dichotomy (ht @ulkar_aghayeva @tszzl) captures the dynamics of our lives, thru the lens of the humble slime mold, physarum polycephalum

we share a fractally-biphasic lifecycle, w/ nested periods of alternating ex…
https://twitter.com/pee_zombie/status/1441834524028162048

nothing I can say to adequately express how surreal this interaction is
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RT @Ukraine
https://twitter.com/russia/status/1442146626026442752
https://twitter.com/Ukraine/status/1442212645310844932

✨ 2000 follower special ✨

grateful to have found this community, and with it, the opportunity for productive discourse and shitpoasts aplenty; this past year.5 would have been much less tolerable w/o it

lets play a little collaborative search game! rules in the replies:

every biological system has evolved precisely to be able to make these decisions in their ecological niche; problems arise when they grow out of it, and their intuitions are no longer adequate

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RT @pee_zombie
thinking about how the explore/exploit dichotomy (ht @ulkar_aghayeva @tszzl) captures the dynamics of our lives, thru the lens of the humble slime mold, physarum polycephalum

we share a fractally-biphasic lifecycle, w/ nested…
https://twitter.com/pee_zombie/status/1441834524028162048

there've been many attempts to model & simulate the logic of these organisms, w/ v promising results; long been fascinated by them, & greatly enjoy reading papers like these. the natural world is full of more wonders than we know

https://arxiv.org/abs/1106.0423

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RT @pee_zombie
slime molds are efficient biological 2-space minimum flow cost solvers and thats fuckin dope #slimemoldtwitter https://twitter.com/embryosophy/status/1340367…
https://twitter.com/pee_zombie/status/1342197082598334464

these organisms have been of great interest to researchers, in our quest to understand the various primitives of intelligence, as well as possibilities for building biological computers; some believe these slime molds to be viable candidates, having constructed basic logic gates!

slime molds have been shown to be able to solve mazes; theyre fascinating to watch in action. you can quite literally see the explore/explore logic laid out in space! see how this one explores the maze, and then builds a pathway to bring back the discovered nutrients?

these organisms present a model for study of biological computation, highly amenable to various situations; presented here is a slime mold routing around mountains in topographical models of the US and Germany. note the similarity to the aforementioned optimization landscapes

here's the fun part: out of this very simple behavior emerges a form of intelligence; the slime mold is able to solve shortest-path problems! over many iterations, we see slime molds construct efficient and resilient networks of tubes between food clusters, on par w/ human algos!

through the 100 second period of these pulsations, the slime mold is effectively exploring its surroundings, executing a sort of physical breadth-first search. once it finds food, it builds "channels", tube-like structures enabling easier transport, and then it repeats.

thats cool and all, but what's the relationship to slime molds?

these organisms are rather primitive, being multinucleated acellular protists, often compared to fungi but much closer to amoebas. of primary interest here is the behavior of the plasmodium stage, how it seeks food

early on in the exploration phase, it is typically advantageous to optimize for optionality, investing energy into creating more possible search avenues, keeping many options open while one searches for higher maxima; this strategy is generally called breadth-first search

the issue is that, depending on the optimization landscape, it might take more energy to arrive at a better maxima than would make the improvement worthwhile; this is why one must take the specifics of their objective function and properties of their landscape into account

depending on the constraints one is operating under, it might be desirable to find a good-enough solution quickly, rather than finding the best-possible; this varies depending on the specifics of the situation. most often, there is a minimum threshold for satisfactory solutions

exploration vs exploitation captures a dynamic common to many optimization systems, especially those with a well-defined objective function, operating in a high-dimensional space with local maxima; in such a space, it is not immediately obvious where the best solution lies

thinking about how the explore/exploit dichotomy (ht @ulkar_aghayeva @tszzl) captures the dynamics of our lives, thru the lens of the humble slime mold, physarum polycephalum

we share a fractally-biphasic lifecycle, w/ nested periods of alternating exploration & exploitation

revealed preferences rule everything around me
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RT @finnitejest
In all seriousness, capitalism is not the source of all your problems and if you continually demand everything and everyone but you change before you can feel better, you will live a sad life dominated by bitter powerlessness
https://twitter.com/finnitejest/status/1440192449108844549

ok which one of you is this reveal thyself
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RT @ARSONDOER

https://twitter.com/ARSONDOER/status/1438886681457930244