Inside Japan's most ambitious plan to create the world's most optimized and efficient urban transport system using slime mold

I never thought I would end up writing an article about slime mold, but I did after watching a TED talk on how a group of Japanese scientists discovered a genius way to design the most optimized urban transportation network in the world. I highly encourage you to watch the full talk here.

Japanese people are well known for creating high quality products and their obsession with developing the most optimized systems in the world. You can see examples of this by using fuzzy logic in home appliances such as washing machines. Fuzzy logic allows computers to handle ambiguous information, such as big and small or hot and cold, to control "smart" consumer and industrial products. They utilized fuzzy logic to develop the most efficient and optimized washing machines that clean the clothes completely while guaranteeing to use less energy, water, and detergent compared to their competitors.

Or developing Tokyo’s gigantic flood tunnels, for example.

Tokyo is facing a major flooding problem. In the past 3 years, Japan has been hit by 4 typhoons that caused serious flooding in the Tokyo area. To combat this problem, the city began construction on a gigantic tunnel system that would siphon floodwater from one side of the city to another.

There are many brilliant illustrations of ingenuity and engineering marvels utilized by Japanese people to solve challenging problems, but nothing beats the example of a Japanese scientist who tackled the problem of traffic and congestion in urban areas.

In Tokyo, the traditional transportation modes are taxi and rail. The rail system is expansive but closed, so that it would have consumed huge amounts of energy just to keep them running. The taxi system is dissatisfying and confusing for new tourists as well. One of the underlying causes of this problem is that Tokyo’s complex network needs many adjustments each year to deal with changing routes or worsening bus routes.

Tokyo scientists experimented by inputting an approximately 10-mile radius around Kobe City. This experiment concluded that the slime mold’s “low power and large number of Watts per cubic meter of space could make it more energy efficient in the long term."

A biological route optimization program called BiMOP offers solutions from microbes to help address urban issues like traffic congestion and dwindling energy resources. For example, in Tokyo, a team of Japanese scientists used slime mold to create a system that predicts how transportation should be configured based on gelatinous pathways generated by nutrient agar in round Petri dishes. The experiments determined that this biologically inspired system would outperform traditional transit engineering strategy groups because Tokyo is among the most congested urban areas in the world—fully 37 hours are lost every year because of poor metro maps. 

This clearly shows the level of cellular intelligence and how it can be further utilized to solve challenging problems.