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Amoeboid designs complex transportation network, eats oats

// January 21st, 2010 // Tech News

For anyone interested in going into engineering, I can offer a warning: prepare to get your butt handed to you repeatedly by nature. Many of the processes at the forefront of engineering technology are just trying to play catch-up with what nature has done an innumerable number of times. Photosynthesis, genetic replication, the creation of joints, even the simple act of flight—nature has done it before, with greater ease, and often cheaper or more efficiently. A paper in the current issue of Science discusses the ability of a single-celled creature to create a robust network while foraging for food—one that mimicked the Tokyo rail system in complexity. Creating a good network is a balancing act; you need to span a large number of nodes with a minimal number of edges (keeping cost low), while being able to function when an edge is lost (fault tolerant). Problems of this type are a shining example of the adage “fast, cheap, or good: pick any two.”