Ig Nobel prize awarded to Japanese researchers for amoeboid intelligence stuudy

ameboid

Last year, a Japanese scientist won an Ig Nobel prize for the achievement of extracting vanilla flavor from cow dung. This year, some Japanese scientists were recognized for their interesting study on the intelligence of unicellular amoeboid organisms:

Toshiyuki Nakagaki, associate professor at Hokkaido University, professor Ryo Kobayashi of Hiroshima University, and Atsushi Tero, a researcher at the Japan Science and Technology Agency, were among the six joint winners of the prize in the cognitive science category.

[...]

At a ceremony at Harvard University’s Sanders Theatre, Nakagaki expressed his thanks for the award, saying that despite conventional wisdom, the unicellular organism is actually smarter than we thought.

Through the study, Nakagaki’s group found that when placed in a square maze 3 centimeters wide, the organism clogs every path by extending itself across. But once food is put at the maze’s entrance and exit, it connects the two points in the shortest possible distance.

For more details on the study, check out:

kabocha

Ummm, that’s certainly interesting, but I don’t think it has much to do with intelligence, or any type of computation, as it does with chemoception (ability to sense chemical signals, like smelling).

To explain the way they did it again, they put the amoeba in the maze and the amoeba filled it up. Then they put food at the beginning and at the end. When the food was placed, the amoeba retracted all of its extensions except the ones connecting the foods together. The caption of their figure (second link under the “more details”) says it takes a day for the amoeba to move from state a to state d.

I guess it is still cool, though, because when the amoeba gets a “taste” of the two foods, it focuses its extensions in the most efficient way possible. It probably does this by coordinating the chemical signals of the two foods at either end. Still, I wouldn’t go close to calling it intelligence.

YT

Probably has to do less with chemicals than it does with energy exertion.

kabocha

Well, what I meant by efficient is indeed the configuration that allows the amoeba to take in the most energy from the food at the lowest energy cost. But the question is what triggered that change in shape. It’s the amoeba sensing the food, right? Before the food was there it didn’t have any reason to direct its shape so specifically; it was searching all over the place. And so the chemical signals from the food guided the amoeba into ending up in the most energy efficient shape.

Ig Nobel prize awarded to Japanese researchers for amoeboid intelligence stuudy

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