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    • Civility [none/use name]
      ·
      edit-2
      3 years ago

      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.

      • Mardoniush [she/her]
        ·
        3 years ago

        Yeah, the soviets used analog computers to create NP-hard heuristics in similar way.

      • Collatz_problem [comrade/them]
        ·
        3 years ago

        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.

        • Civility [none/use name]
          ·
          3 years ago

          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.

      • blobjim [he/him]
        ·
        3 years ago

        I think without eyes or a mouth or any of that stuff it isn't really human anyways. Like I guess there's human DNA and stuff, but it's not like it has all the stuff for pain reception or whatever. Or maybe it does!

          • blobjim [he/him]
            ·
            3 years ago

            These neurons never had those things. They're just random neurons or something.

        • WammaWink2 [none/use name]
          ·
          edit-2
          3 years ago

          we don't know enough to do this kind of research ethically. Full stop.

          Just because you cannot recognize someone as a person does not mean they aren't a person, also. There are people who still need to use giant iron lungs to breath and they are definitely people.