A gelatinous, single-celled life form has just solved an increasingly complex problem that many researchers use to test algorithms. Even more impressi

An Amoeba Just Found an Entirely New Way to Solve a Classic Computing Problem

submited by

Style Pass

2021-06-14 00:30:05

A gelatinous, single-celled life form has just solved an increasingly complex problem that many researchers use to test algorithms.

Even more impressive is the fact that, as the problem got harder, the slime mould amoeba actually solved the problem in a totally different – and arguably more efficient – way than most algorithms.

The result suggests that these simple lifeforms might actually offer an alternative processing method to conventional computers.

To be clear, the amoeba wasn't faster than computers, not by a long stretch (check out how slow they move in the video below).

But while the problem got exponentially more complex, the amoeba's processing time only increased linearly. You can see why that's a big difference below:

The problem it had to solve was the Traveling Salesman Problem, or TPS for short. This is basically an optimisation problem which requires a computer to look at a list of cities and figure out the shortest route, so that each city is visited exactly once.

As more cities are added to the itinerary, the problem gets increasingly more complex - with four cities on the list there are only three possible routes to choose between. But for eight cities, the situation jumps up to 2,520 routes.