Making a maze....

[Andrew Dalke]

John J. Lee:
> One algorithm that's not so easy to implement in Python:
>
> http://www.abc.net.au/science/news/stories/s189608.htm

It's a rather uninformative article.  It says that a slime mold
found the optimal path to a food source, and claimed that that's
a form of intellegence.  It doesn't mention precautions made
to ensure that the action isn't a simple tropic response to
go towards where more receptors on the slime mold surface
say "here there be food!".  In other words, by the definition
used in the article, a plant is intellegent because it finds the
direct path to light and water is intelligent because it finds
the most direct route downhill.

And all those could be done in Python -- it's the reverse
of the breadth-first search.  The food source emits tiny
particles which diffuse outwards.  An exponential function
describes the density of particles, although constrained
by the walls.  In general, the higher the density the closer
the food source, so if there's a decision point, go the
route with the higher signal.

                    Andrew
                    dalke at dalkescientific.com