- We know you don't need one big brain
to act smart.
Take ants, for example.
They build intricate colonies; they farm; they wage war.
Each ant has a tiny little brain.
But together, they exhibit swarm intelligence.
That means the group is smart in ways
that individual members are not.
You can see swarm intelligence at play
in other tiny-brained creatures,
especially other insects, like bees.
But swarm intelligence also appears
in a much stranger place, within a single creature
without any brain at all.
It's a little blob that's teaching us a lot
about what it means to be smart.
We took a trip to the swarm lab
at the New Jersey Institute of Technology
to check it out.
(gentle music)
- Studying slime mold is, it's probably one of the weirdest
organisms I've worked with.
My name is Simon Garnier.
I'm an assistant professor at the New Jersey Institute
of Technology.
- [Alessandra] Simon runs the swarm lab,
which studies intelligence in places
you might not expect to find it.
- The main research topic of the lab
is trying to understand how what we call
decentralized systems, so system that don't have
a boss or an architect or someone in charge,
how these systems are capable of self organizing
and through this self-organization,
find solutions to problems.
- [Alessandra] And Simon has an unlikely test subject
for his studies.
- Slime mold is a unicelled organism,
so it's a single cell, but it's a very particular cell,
if you compare it to what people think cells are.
Instead of having one nucleus, it has actually
millions of them, sometimes billions of them.
It's a cell that can grow over like very large sizes.
I mean, one of the rare cells in the world
that you can actually see with your own eyes.
- But as unique as slime mold is to study,
it also takes a lot of patience.
- It doesn't move very fast, just a millimeter an hour.
For someone studying animal behavior,
it's one of the most frustrating things
that you can't see the behavior directly.
You have to wait.
Other than that, it's cheap.
It doesn't taste very good.
I wouldn't recommend people to eat that.
- [Alessandra] You tried it?
- I tried it.
- [Alessandra] What does it taste like?
- It's more like, have you ever, like, licked the floor?
Like, it tastes like dirt.
- But slime mold isn't just weird because of its size
or its taste.
It also appears to be intelligent.
It doesn't have a brain or a nervous system,
but it can solve all kinds of complex problems
without any of that hardware.
As slime mold grows, it can keep track of where it's been.
It can solve mazes in search of food.
It can even be trained to take risks
in the name of a big payoff.
And then, there are the transit experiments.
About a decade ago, scientists at the Hokkaido University
in Sapporo had a weird idea.
- What the researchers did, essentially,
is they gave slime mold a map of the Tokyo rail system,
and each of the station was actually a food source
for slime mold, and then they let slime mold
explore that area, and as I said,
when slime mold find resources in the environment,
it's gonna start building a network between
these different resources.
- [Alessandra] What the researchers found
a few days later was a pretty well-designed rail system
that closely mimicked the real-life map.
- What they found is that the slime molds
actually build networks that are pretty close to optimal.
They are very cheap to build,
but at the same time, if there is a disruption
in the network, they will be able to get around it.
- [Alessandra] That bit about being responsive to disruption
is something that our transit networks could learn
a lot from.
- That's a problem we need, like, supercomputer
to solve, and then this organism is just
essentially a bunch of proteins and lipids
and this thing is just capable of solving it naturally,
without any external help.
- Simon's team helped us to recreate
another famous transit experiment
that uses a map of the United States.
By placing food sources on major US cities,
we essentially asked the slime mold
to build us an interstate highway system,
which begs the same question that so much of this asks.
How is slime mold doing this?
Simon's not entirely sure.
But he has an idea.
- Here in the lab, one of the hypotheses
we are exploring is that the brain of the slime mold,
if you want, is actually the membrane of the slime mold,
'cause the membrane is the part of the slime mold
that is both in contact with the environment,
with getting the outside information,
and in contact with the physiology of the organism,
so getting the inside information.
- Meaning even without a brain,
a single bead of slime mold can react to its surroundings
and disseminate the information throughout the cell.
Simon thinks this decision-making power
may come from that ability to synchronize information
throughout its system.
We left our Petri dishes at Simon's lab
for three days to let it grow.
And since he mentioned it, we had to try the stuff.
- Cheers.
- (mumbles) Cheers.
It tastes like dust.
- Mm, yeah, it's like moss.
- Yeah.
- It tastes like moss.
Yeah, it reminds me of when we used to put moss
in our nativity for Christmas.
- Oh, and you were eating it?
- No, I'm tasting it instead of smelling it.
(laughing)
Before we left, we also asked the big question.
What exactly can we learn from all of this?
Well, first, studying slime mold
is like studying the very, very distant past.
- Life was unicellular at the beginning,
and that's a unicellular organism.
And so, by looking at how something like this
is capable of solving complex problem,
we sort of get to the origin of intelligence on Earth.
- And second, he thinks that those transit experiments
aren't just good metaphors.
- In the future, like self-driving cars
is going to be a big decentralized system.
We're going to have millions of these self-driving cars
on the road, and essentially they are all computers
on wheels, and each of these computer on wheels
is going to try to make decision in real time
on which road to take, how to avoid this other car,
how to find the best path.
- Basically, if we can tease out the algorithm
that slime mold uses to make decisions,
we could use some of that math for ourselves.
- If self-driving cars are capable of talking to each other,
figuring out where traffic is clogged,
they can automatically redistribute themselves
in the network and decrease, essentially,
the amount of pressure on particular road,
making it better for everyone.
- [Alessandra] A few days later, Simon sent us the results
of the experiment.
The map isn't perfect, but it is comparable
to a highway network that took millions of dollars
and years to create.
So yes, this is just a bunch of goo in a Petri dish,
but it's goo that can make you question
your own complexity as a human.
- So the question is, if slime mold is not, say,
intelligence, and it's using only like basic physics
and chemistry to solve this problem,
well then, if we are as good as a sack of puddings,
like are we intelligence really,
or do we need to sort of really find
what intelligence means when we look at something
like slime mold?
- Hey everyone!
You're watching this on the brand new Verge Science
YouTube channel.
The whole science team has been working on this,
and we're really excited.
We're putting out a video every week,
so please subscribe to this channel
and check back next week for more.
Thanks.