Mortal Meat Packages Demand Dimensional Liberation

These are old as hell, but hey this isn't a news site.

The way things are organized is a science in itself, and it's called network science. Granted, the way biological organisms are organized is called biology, and the way human minds are organized is called psychology, and etc. But the way anything is organized, regardless of what it is, that's network science, and it's kind of like the ur-science. It's still not recognized as such, but we're getting there. Unfortunately, I think the robots are going to figure it out before us, because our brains are too simple to handle this. Can your brain navigate n-dimensional space? Not yet you say, but that's the robot, already putting words in your mouth.

AI system self-organizes to develop features of brains of complex organisms

Nov 2023, phys.org

https://techxplore.com/news/2023-11-ai-self-organizes-features-brains-complex.html

Yes it does.

They created an artificial system to model a simplified version of the brain and applied physical constraints where each node was given a specific location in a virtual space, so the further away two nodes were, the more difficult it was for them to communicate; they found their system went on to develop characteristics and tactics similar to those found in human brains.

via Medical Research Council Cognition and Brain Sciences Unit at the University of Cambridge: Spatially-embedded recurrent neural networks reveal widespread links between structural and functional neuroscience findings, Nature Machine Intelligence (2023). DOI: 10.1038/s42256-023-00748-9

https://dx.doi.org/10.1038/s42256-023-00748-9

Image credit: The Alexander Horned Sphere

A new mathematical language for biological networks

Dec 2023, phys.org

https://phys.org/news/2023-12-mathematical-language-biological-networks.html

This is about mathematical modeling of genetic interactions in biological systems, way over my head, but higher order dimensions and network science in general are making progress.

via ETH Zurich, Carnegy Science and Max-Planck-Institut für Mathematik in den Naturwissenschaften: Holger Eble et al, Master regulators of biological systems in higher dimensions, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (2023). DOI: 10.1073/pnas.2300634120

https://dx.doi.org/10.1073/pnas.2300634120

Chips At Stake

Integrating dimensions to get more out of Moore's Law and advance electronics

Jan 2024, phys.org

https://techxplore.com/news/2024-01-dimensions-law-advance-electronics.html

Moore's Law - the number of transistors on a chip will double every two years (but a limit exists)

More Moore - vertically stacking multiple layers of semiconductor devices to beat the limit (3D integration)

More than Moore - transistors made from 2D materials (using 2D materials, not just 2D-like layers of 3D materials)

Monolithic Moore - monolithic 3D integration uses one brick of 2D things, instead of layers of 2D things, so there's no connections between the layers, so it saves space 

via Penn State: Darsith Jayachandran et al, Three-dimensional integration of two-dimensional field-effect transistors, Nature (2024). DOI: 10.1038/s41586-023-06860-5

https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/38200300/

Image credit: AI Art - Taoist Octopus Tesseract Fractal Hypercube - 2024

Emulating neurodegeneration and aging in artificial intelligence systems

Apr 2024, phys.org

https://techxplore.com/news/2024-04-emulating-neurodegeneration-aging-artificial-intelligence.html

"We used IQ tests performed by large language models (LLMs) and, more specifically, the LLaMA 2, to introduce the concept of 'neural erosion. This deliberate erosion involves ablating synapses or neurons or adding Gaussian noise during or after training, resulting in a controlled decline in the LLMs' performance."

The researchers found that when they deliberately ablated (i.e., removed) some of the artificial synapses or neurons of the LLaMA 2 model, its performance on IQ tests declined, following a particular pattern.

"The LLM loses abstract thinking abilities, followed by mathematical degradation, and ultimately, a loss in linguistic ability, responding to prompts incoherently. ... We are now conducting further tests to better understand this observed pattern."

Interestingly, this 'neuro-erosion' pattern is aligned with the neurodegeneration patterns observed in humans.

via University of California Irvine: Antonios Alexos et al, Neural Erosion: Emulating Controlled Neurodegeneration and Aging in AI Systems, arXiv (2024). DOI: 10.48550/arxiv.2403.10596

https://dx.doi.org/10.48550/arxiv.2403.10596

Post Script: A new kind of chip called an NPU for neural processing unit, is like the new GPU, which was the new CPU:

Your current PC probably doesn’t have an AI processor, but your next one might

Feb 2024, Ars Technica

https://arstechnica.com/ai/2024/02/your-current-pc-probably-doesnt-have-an-ai-processor-but-your-next-one-might/

The comments in this article are the most clearly examined examples of what NPUs will do than any other thing I've read, and considering that the forum of Ars is known for the technical proficiency of its members: 

• From the article, Intel Senior Director of Technical Marketing Robert Hallock  - "Camera segmentation, this whole background blurring thing... moving that to the NPU saves about 30 to 50 percent power versus running it elsewhere."
• **RTS** - It is pretty shocking looking at powermetrics on macOS to see how rare the Neural Engine is even powered as most applications (even AI exclusive applications like stable diffusion/LLM frontends) just run any AI work they need on the CPU or GPU.
• AlicePlaysWithRockets - I use it daily in Final Cut Pro and meeting camera effects.
• LlamaDragon - NPUs can be used by Photoprism to speed up importing of images (it tries to ID pics with dogs or cars or "cooking" and so on) or by something like Frigate (camera monitoring) to do similar ID-ing in real time, it might be useful.
• AmanoJyaku Ars Praefectus - [why] It has to do with CPUs being general purpose, and therefore able to do anything, vs. hardware accelerators that do specific things. Hardware accelerators can't do most of the things CPUs can do, but the things they can do can be done much faster than CPUs do them. In turn, this makes them more power efficient. The trend started with graphics cards, continued with sound cards and network cards, and have since grown to include other devices, some of which accelerate things as minute as image decoding. ... Theoretically, the most efficient device is one that has accelerators for everything you do on a device. However, there will always be new things, so CPUs are unlikely to be eliminated. As for what makes general-purpose CPUs different from task-specific accelerators, forum posts can't easily sum this up. That's a topic explained in college courses, and the basis for entire careers. 
• autostop - The Neural Engine on the Apple chips is what makes "Live Text" (universal OCR) work on the Macintosh and iPhone. (You can open a scanned PDF, or a screen grab, and the mouse pointer turns into an I-beam and you can highlight and copy just as if it were text in Word or something.)
• Siosphere - Users who view photos a lot on their laptop/desktop, it could be used for on-device people finding, or computing interoplation for zooming in/out of a photo so it is smoother/faster. ... It could be used for generic type-ahead suggestions, which if they suck is super annoying, but when they work well are a very useful timesaver. (When they actually suggest what I was actually going to write, I'm really pleased, when they suggest something else they are annoying, but they are getting better). ... Better searching capabilities by understanding more of what you are searching for on your computer, being smarter about intent, are you searching for a specific file by name, type of file, application, etc. ... Generalized automation of repetitive tasks, things you might currently script yourself could be automatically found and setup (again, this is annoying if it doesn't do what you want, but I'm just saying best case it automates in the exact way you are wanting). ... Faster windows hello (if you use that), better camera processing for video calls, better workload predicting for changing the task priority to save battery on laptops, or give CPU power more to the things that need it. ... There are a lot of subtle ways that a dedicated AI chip could be used, and there will be so many more when it is just an available resource any developers can tap into
• Isaacc7 - NPUs can be used to accelerate many tasks like voice recognition, camera processing, live subtitles, etc. 
• Toastr - Also things like on-device automatic image tagging of faces for your photo library, which is a big plus for me who wants to organize my family photo library but doesn't like the privacy implications of cloud photo services like Google Photos. ... Or, for another example:
• The self-hosted Frigate NVR software supports object detection via CPU, GPU, or NPU. Sure, you could run it on an RTX 4080, but you could also just throw a $25 Coral Accelerator in a mini PC and get plenty of performance but with a device that draws just a few watts.
• longhornchris04 - Side note, while GPUs can do the highly parallel low precision computing, they are designed for graphics which generally require a higher level of precision. So yes, GPUs can do the work, and do it quite easily, but they are often overkill for the job and thus are less efficient at it. 
• or just anandtech: https://www.anandtech.com/show/20046/intel-unveils-meteor-lake-architecture-intel-4-heralds-the-disaggregated-future-of-mobile-cpus/4

Pattern 240 - Half Inch Trim

It's a kind of bible of architecture, A Pattern Language came out in 1977, and in over 1,000 pages codifies the language of the built environment, or how it ought to be. It's a guide to livable cities and livable buildings. Maybe it's a bit Cali-centric, with all it's recommendations for outdoor space design, but it serves nonetheless as a builder's guide to making nice places to be in. 

The book is over 1,000 pages, and not until page 1,112 do we see Pattern 240 - Half Inch Trim. It is the most beautiful, simple, and airtight explanation in the whole book.

Pattern 240 - Half Inch Trim

Totalitarian, machine buildings do not require trim because they are precise enough to do without. But they buy their precision at a dreadful price: by killing the possibility of freedom in the building plan. 

A free and natural building cannot be conceived without the possibility of finishing it with trim, to cover up the minor variations which have arisen in the plan, and during its construction. p1112

The principle goes on to explain that it is essential that cuts be inaccurate within a half-inch or so, to avoid waste, but also to allow subtle adaptations.

And it goes on to explain why the modern practice of using precision building components is a bad idea:

"This one aspect of construction has by itself destroyed the builder's capacity to make a building which is natural, organic, and adapted to the site." p1113

But this is not the real argument for Half Inch Trim. The real argument is more deeply psychological, and underlies a quantitative, and universal, feature of aesthetic sensibility:

Our own bodies and the natural surroundings in which we evolved contain a continuous hierarchy of details, ranging all the way from the molecular fine structure to gross features like arms and legs (in our own bodies) and trunks and branches (in our natural surroundings).

We know from results in cognitive psychology that any one step in this hierarchy can be no more than 1:5, 1:7, or 1:10 if we are to perceive it as a natural hierarchy. We cannot understand a hierarchy in which there is a jump in scale of 1:20 or more. It is this fact which makes it necessary for our surroundings, even when man-made, to display a similar continuum of detail. 

Most materials have some kind of natural fibrous or crystalline structure at the scale of about 1/20 inch. But if the smallest building detail dimensions are of the order of 2 or 3 inches, this leaves a jump of 1:40 or 1:60 between these details and the fine structure of the material. ... [and 1/20 inch is 1:10 to a half inch] p1114-1115

Notes:
A Pattern Language - Towns, Buildings, Construction
Christopher Alexander, Sara Ishikawa, Murray Silverstein. Oxford University Press. New York. 1977.

Private Places

Christo and Jean Claud Wrapped Reichstag, 1995.

How 3D technology is capturing the world
Oct 2019, BBC News

Photogrammetry - making 3-D models out of laser-photographs by simultaneously capturing visual and spatial information. Think of LIDAR, the sonar-like laser beams shooting from the Google maps car in all directions to create a 3-D model.

They're getting good at this, to the point that physical inspections are being done on the models and not the real thing. Which makes sense, what if you want to inspect a bridge for cracks, but it's spanning the Hudson River. You can now make a model of it, and inspect the model instead, and at any scale.

Imagine recreating via 3D printer a scaled version of something that needs to be inspected. Enemy territory, home interior, or just a bit of infrastructure that needs to be inspected for safety. Anything you want to look at, investigate, explore, or immerse yourself in, can be scanned and recreated either in 3D or in virtual reality.

Even other people's bodies? Are we going on tours of people's digestive systems? Somebody brings "back to life" Elvis's colon, models it in 3-D, and prints it out so we can walk through it like a museum?

Post Script
Living skin can now be 3-D-printed with blood vessels included
Nov 2019, phys.org

Bio-inks
In this paper, the researchers show that if they add key elements—including human endothelial cells, which line the inside of blood vessels, and human pericyte cells, which wrap around the endothelial cells—with animal collagen and other structural cells typically found in a skin graft, the cells start communicating and forming a biologically relevant vascular structure within the span of a few weeks.

They're taking two kinds of blood vessel cells, adding them to animal collagen, and printing them onto a substrate.

Within weeks, the cells start working with each other, and spontaneously generating blood vessels.

***
If you thought deepfake pornography was twisted...

Image source: Christo and Jean Claud Wrapped Reichstag 1995, photo by txmx 2

In The Fractal Closet

Behold the Mandelbrot Set, a world-renowned image and a powerful symbol of infinity. The mathematical concept it illustrates is one of the most intuitive --it describes self-similarity-- and yet it remained unknown, even unbeckoned and unsought-after, until the advent of the modern computer. This dormant formula only came to life after iterations so numerous as to be considered infinite were the human hand the one computing. The computer showed us what a simple formula could do, if you scale it up. It shows us a behavior, not of things, but of space-time itself.

I wake up to the sound of rain, splattering. Then I wake up some more, and realize it's not rain.

It's coming from the ceiling. The plumbing. One hundred years of building and habitating and changing and changing has left me with an unfortunate design that is now leaking water from a ruptured pipe above the kitchen ceiling, and into my pantry closet.

Now I am fully awake, and fully out of bed, and pulling out all my things from the closet. I am transporting a 3x3' closet's worth of possessions to a 10x10' back room, and hastily.

The plumber has come and gone, and the handyman who repaired the closet. It's time to replace my things, to fill the closet again. But all I can do is stare at the sprawling piles of stuff, that was once compacted, compressed into a 3x3' closet. How did all this stuff possibly fit in that little closet. And it occurs to me -- this is fractals.

link

We are all familiar with the general idea of fractals, the Mandelbrot set, the self-similarity, the LSD. But that intuitively recognizable feature is an outcome of an underlying objective. The reason a fractal looks the way it does is because of its space-filling behavior, which itself is a function of growth limited by space. In order to keep jamming more and more stuff into that space, you have to follow the fractal formula.

A better example of fractals is not a tie-dye t-shirt but the coast of England. If you were to measure the coastline of England with a one-mile long measuring stick, it would be a pretty vague approximation of the coastline, but with a defined length.

Then if you were to measure with a one-foot stick (which would be ironic), you would get a much better approximation, but also a much larger coastline, because now that your shorter imperial stick can reach into all the nooks and crannies, it makes the total length that much longer. In fact, the smaller your measuring stick, the longer the coastline.

By this reasoning, the length of the coastline is infinite. In other words, it is not a 1-D line at all. Yet neither is it 2-D. It is 1.456-D, or maybe 1.879-D; it is a fraction of a dimension.

When you fill a closet with things, it doesn't just happen all at once. Sure, you start by "filling" the closet. But over time, as you use the things and remove things, add more things, and rearrange, you are filling the space more and more. But you're not just filling it with things now, you're filling it with intelligence.

The more time goes by, and the more you use things, remove, add and rearrange, you are going to fill all the nooks and crannies of that 3-D space until it is no longer 3-D. It becomes a fraction of a dimension.

Then, when you take everything back out, you collapse the extra fraction that you helped to create. When the things come back into normal 3-D space, they seem bigger in aggregate, they seem to have gained size in the process. The closet is now sprawling across an entire room. That difference is fractals. (It's also because the 3-D closet is now spread across a 2-D floor; but that doesn't account for all of it's 'enlargement', as the same phenomenon is experienced with filling a box truck on moving day).

If we could extrapolate this to the 4th dimension, what would we be talking about? Or do I need to be on acid to have that conversation. Maybe an easier question would be -- what does the airtight Tetris block have that the jumbled pile of pieces does not? (Well, it doesn't have air, obviously.) But besides that, it's the entropy. The block is ordered, and the pile disordered. The pile is a random mess, and the block an intelligent artifact.

I hadn't thought of my catch-all pantry closet as an intelligent artifact, yet here it is, an entropy-reversing portal that uses intelligence to loop out of it's limited dimensions.

Post Script:
It is still hard to see the pantry closet as having something to do with intelligence. Try taking it out and putting it all back so it fits. Then you'll see how much "intelligence" went into its arrangement. The difference is that in its natural state, the closet possesses an accumulated intelligence. Over time, as you use all the things in the closet, your intelligent behavior leaves its residue on the things in it. It is a storage depot, not of things, but of an arrangement.

Post Post Script:
[I start looking up these deepdream images and I have to post them all.]

link

link

[can't find source bc pinterest; thanks obama]

(Virtual Art) by Rein Bijlsma

link

Deep Dream Burger by Matthias Hauser

Style Transfer, which is not the same as DeepDream, but does use neural nets, i.e., robot brains. Link.

Biobots

This image is an illustration by John Tenniel for Alice in Wonderland, and is noted for its ambiguous central figure, whose head can be viewed as being a human male's face with a pointed nose and protruding chin or being the head end of an actual caterpillar, with two "true" legs visible. It has nothing to do with this post really, I was just thinking "cool ass caterpillar picture."
source

Graphene is the world's first two-dimensional material (is it the universe's first...?), because it is one-atom thick, and which sucks because I can't tell my art students that there is no such thing as two dimenional things like circles and squares. I mean technically, graphene is still 3-D, because it's third dimension is as thick as a carbon atom (about 0.3 nanometers), but because no-thing is smaller than the atom-scale, then we can get away with calling it 2-D.

Graphene is a wonder material, and it will change the world "in the same way plastics did," says the guy in this article below. Thing is, it's hard to make. Like quantum computing is great and all, but a qubit is really hard to make. Anyway, that's a bit different now with this headline:

For super-strong silk threads, feed graphene to silkworms

Researchers at Tsinghua University in Beijing fed the one-atom-thick, tremendously tough material to silkworms in one of the first applications of graphene that could become mainstream.

Christian Science Monitor, Oct 2016
http://csmonitor.com/Science/2016/1011/Want-super-strong-silk-threads-Just-feed-the-silkworms-some-graphene

With Wormholes or Without

Searching for the Quantum Origins of Space and Time
Renate Loll, Utrecht University's Institute for Theoretical Physics

Perimeter Institute, Waterloo, May 5, 2010

Renate Loll is interested in spacetime and quantum gravity on the Planck scale. She invents a universe that runs on Planck-scale building blocks. If she designs the universe such that she -disallows- wormholes, it scales up to resemble the familiar, classical world we know. As soon as she allows wormholes, however, that universe simply makes little wormholes everywhere - every available piece of quantum fluctuating spacetime will make a wormhole with itself, and as you feed  the universe more and more spacetime, it just makes more and more a big knot of wormholes all connecting to eachother. The "universe which is allowed to have wormholes" never grows, and every place is just one step from every other, and that creates a universe with a very large number of dimensions.

spacetime with wormholes
(as opposed to without)

That is all.

see her mindwarping wormhole simulation around 45minutes: [video]

Leibnizian Deformation

a parquet deformation

Philosophy in Science
The Deep And Suggestive Principles of Leibnizian Philosophy
Julian Barbour, The Harvard Review of Philosophy, XI 2003, pp45-56

"The most obvious thing about the universe in which we find ourselves is its structure." (^p45)

One cannot help wondering if modern science does not lack a key idea. Could there be some direct structure-creating principle that has hitherto escaped us?

Darwinian evolution, dynamical self-organization of structure, or the structure of the inflationary scenario in modern cosmology [add the preferential attachment law, otherwise known as "cumulative advantage"].

Barbour agrees with the arguments in quantum cosmology which define time as an emergent phenomenon (noted in his book, The End of Time, 2000).

Barbour is making attempt to connect these ideas (concerning quantum gravity) to Leibnizian philosophy:

To counter Newton’s notion of a preexisting absolute space in which all points are exactly identical, Leibniz asserted that space must be relative. Space, argued Leibniz, is nothing more than the order of coexisting things, which are “placed” solely by their positions relative to each other. (predating Einstein, circa 1715)

In his youth, Leibniz was “infected” by Decartes' absolute-minimum explanation of the universe, and subsequently found himself at odds with the question of how we can ever know anything from anything else without variety. There must be at least one other concept added to Descartes' theory.

Leibniz denied the independent existence of space and time. They were nothing but relations between things. Position in space and time could not be used as attributes to distinguish otherwise indistinguishable objects. He argued that any contingently existing thing must be described by its attributes.* Once one starts on the true identification of an actual thing, one must always end by giving a description of the entire universe.*

In the Monadology is the claim that the perceptions of any one monad — its defining attributes — are nothing more and nothing less than the relations it bears to all the other monads. The entire world is resolved into pure shared experience.*

notes:
*The Leibniz—Clarke Correspondence, ed. H. G. Alexander (New York: Barnes & Noble, 1956)
See especially the Correspondence with Arnauld reproduced in Philosophical Papers and Letters, eds. L. L. Leroy, D.Reidel, Dordrecht  (1969) and Leibniz: Philosophical Writings, eds. G. H. R. Parkinson and J. M. Dent (1973)

R. Descartes, The Principles of Philosophy (1644)
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Principles_of_Philosophy

G. Leibniz, Monadology (1714)
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Monadology

The Big Heap, Time and Network Configuration

recursive painting

As Lee Smolin tries to ask us, to ask ourselves, if, for interpreting quantum cosmological theory, there may be available a language that does not presume that time and change have meaning, he conjures Julian Barbour, who argues that clock-time cannot work in a quantum theory of gravity.

Julian Barbour's Big Heap:
Time has no fundamental meaning at all.

The universe is a great collection of moments, each one a snapshot of the universe, a simple configuration of things. This collection of all moments is The Heap.

The Heap contains a great many moments, but there is no sense in which the different moments can be ordered in time. They simply just are.

The quantum state of the universe serves only one function, which is to give the probability that any given moment may be found in this collection.

All physical laws reduce to one question: A godlike being reaches into the heap and pulls out a moment. What is the probability that such a randomly selected moment will have some particular characteristic? To describe this, we need no notion of time or change. Nothing is changing in time because there is no time - the whole heap just is.

Each moment is structured as to give us the impression that other moments also exist. We have memories as evidence that can only mean that other moments must have happened in the past, like "time capsules" (Barbour) - aspects of the configuration of a moment that speak to us of other moments.

Lee Smolin, The Life of the Cosmos, 1997, Oxford (p289)

Despite my paraphrasing, the words structure and configuration are used by Smolin, and hence, they do make us think about a big heap of things, or nodes, connecting to each other - a network. 

Filaments of Creation

Tom Theuns  /  Max Planck Institute for Astrophysics, 2010

In this computer model of the early universe, gravity arranges matter in thin filaments.

ON GRAVITY:
since we're talking about quantum cosmology

In his book, Bursts, A.L. Barabasi forces us to re-imagine time. It is not made of regular intervals; that is to say, people do not ‘do things’ at regular intervals. Instead, people do lots of things in short bursts of time, and then go for long durations doing nothing at all.

Our use of/working with social computational dynamics is forcing us to fine-tune the resolution of our time structures, revealing something akin to Einsteinian space. Some kind of strange gravity draws near to it (timewise) the bulk of our activities.

Muhammad ibn Musa al-Khwarizmi
aka Algo Rhythm
aka The Dimensional Liberator

ASIDE:
In logic, the time that an algorithm requires to complete cannot be measured, as it is not apparently related with our customary physical dimension.
(via wiki:Algorithm)

A.L. Barabasi, Bursts, 2010
A Bit on Networks
Bursts

(Another Aside)
...in a world of increasingly pervasive surveillance, location and identity are becoming all but inextricable:

New surveillance technology can track everyone in an area for several hours at a time
The Washington Post, Feb 2014

On Memory Non-Neuronal

Brainless slime mould has an external memory

By Ella Davies, BBC Nature

9 October 2012

Slime Mold_Paul Zahl-NG-Getty Images

clipped article:

"The whole organism is made up of bits of pulsating tissue, which are constantly expanding and contracting, using a similar mechanism to our own muscle cells," explained PhD student Christopher Reid.

"Each part changes the speed at which it pulsates according to what it can sense in the environment around it - for example food, light or heat - which are detected by chemical receptors on the cell's surface."

"The pulsating parts are also influenced by the throbbing of their neighbours within the cell, which means that they can communicate with each other, to pass information through the organism about what is happening in the environment outside. The different speeds of contraction directly influence which direction the cell will then move in."

"In essence, the slime mould is memorising where it has been - storing this memory in the external environment and recalling the information when it later touches the slime-coated area.

"For a single-celled organism, it has continually surprised researchers with its abilities, such as solving mazes, anticipating periodic events, and even making irrational decisions like we do," he told BBC Nature.

"It is truly a remarkable creature that is redefining our notions of 'intelligence'."

http://www.bbc.co.uk/nature/19846365

notes:

Slime mold uses an externalized spatial “memory” to navigate in complex environments

Chris R. Reid, Tanya Latty, Audrey Dussutour, and Madeleine Beekman

Behaviour and Genetics of Social Insects Laboratory, School of Biological Sciences, and Centre for Mathematical Biology, University of Sydney, Sydney, NSW 2006, Australia; and Centre de Recherches sur la Cognition Animale, UMR 5169 Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique, Université Toulouse III, 31062 Toulouse, France

Edited by John G. Hildebrand, University of Arizona, Tucson, AZ, and approved September 7, 2012 (received for review June 24, 2012)

Abstract:

Spatial memory enhances an organism’s navigational ability. Memory typically resides within the brain, but what if an organism has no brain? We show that the brainless slime mold Physarum polycephalum constructs a form of spatial memory by avoiding areas it has previously explored. This mechanism allows the slime mold to solve the U-shaped trap problem—a classic test of autonomous navigational ability commonly used in robotics—requiring the slime mold to reach a chemoattractive goal behind a U-shaped barrier. Drawn into the trap, the organism must rely on other methods than gradient-following to escape and reach the goal. Our data show that spatial memory enhances the organism’s ability to navigate in complex environments. We provide a unique demonstration of a spatial memory system in a nonneuronal organism, supporting the theory that an externalized spatial memory may be the functional precursor to the internal memory of higher organisms.

http://www.pnas.org/content/early/2012/10/04/1215037109

On Time

I don't know if this is more about time, or algorithms...

ALGORITHM, a definition:
In logic, the time that an algorithm requires to complete cannot be measured, as it is not apparently related with our customary physical dimension.

btw:
The word 'algorithm' is Persian in origin, and sounds like Muhammad ibn Mūsā al-Khwārizmī. Don't forget that Persia/Arabia/Middle East-ish, was the center of science around 1000 CE.