Mushroom learns to crawl after being given robot body (2024)
the-independent.com

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176 points

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Anon84

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13 days ago

75 comments

cloudbonsai ・ 10 days ago

This seems to be one of the researches from Organic Robotics Lab at Cornell Univ.

https://orl.mae.cornell.edu/

https://news.cornell.edu/stories/2024/08/biohybrid-robots-co...

I believe that "learn" is a bit too strong word here. The fungi is essentially a UV light sensor. The researchers made a robot that moves in a certain way based on the biological signal.

So the mushroom is more like a passive sensor then an active pilot.

  • larodi ・ 10 days ago

    It can be firing in arbitrary banner and we’ll still call it movement. Like the LLM does random and lossy decompression and we give it context and meaning…

    • IAmBroom ・ 9 days ago

      cloudbonsai disputed the word "learned", and you countered by validating the word "movement". A completely orthogonal argument.

Legend2440 ・ 11 days ago

I’m skeptical that the mushroom is in any way “learning to crawl”. It looks more like the mushroom naturally produces signals in response to light, and the robot triggers a walk cycle when it sees that signal.

  • ofalkaed ・ 11 days ago

    As a fungophile who spends way too much time crawling around in the woods looking for mushrooms, I think fungus learned to crawl before we did.

    • lopatin ・ 10 days ago

      Off topic but my dad took me around the woods this weekend to show me mushrooms and he almost couldn’t contain his excitement. And this is a person who usually doesn’t like stuff. And the whole time I was like “yep, that’s a mushroom”. There’s clearly something fascinating about the hobby that I don’t get (yet). Curious to hear your take.

      • ofalkaed ・ 10 days ago

        Your dad sounds like a good sort. I have no idea how to explain the mushroom fascination that some of us have to those that lack it and have mostly learned to just not talk about mushrooms with people who don't have the fascination.

    • pyman ・ 10 days ago

      I find that claim interesting, especially given your background in studying fungus. Could you expand on it a bit?

      • sethammons ・ 10 days ago
        ・ 3 more

        Slime molds are super interesting and are able to find optimal paths for resource management. Slime molds have been used to model and improve traffic flow for humans.

        https://phys.org/news/2022-01-virtual-slime-mold-subway-netw...

        I would call this action "crawling" and I am sure predates mammals. Or dinosaurs. Or plants.

        • empthought ・ 10 days ago
          ・ 2 more

          Slime molds aren’t fungus, though…

          • sethammons ・ 10 days ago

            > Slime molds are classified within the Kingdom Protista, and are more closely related to amoebas and certain seaweeds than to fungi, plants, or animals.

            Not a true fungi; today I learned. Thanks!

      • ofalkaed ・ 10 days ago
        ・ 6 more

        If you take a small plot of wild land, say 50'x50' and visit it everyday watching all the various mushrooms which will grow there (there will be far more then most people realize or expect) and try and find the sense in where and when they fruit it becomes difficult to write it all off as simple biological responses to environment/following the food/etc, and even if you do look at it that way and start adding up the possible causes and effects you can end up with such a long list that it becomes difficult to not see it as some sort of at least instinctual level intelligence and that the growth of mycelium often has more in common with crawling than mindless growth.

        For example, many mushrooms are very good at fruiting just out of sight from trails, walk 20' off the trail, turn around and suddenly you start seeing mushrooms. Instinct is to say that all the mushrooms which grow within sight of the trail get picked by curious people or kicked by children but if you start looking for remains and stumps and mushrumps and those hard to spot just starting to fruit immature buttons, you find surprisingly few. So you think environmental, the trail alters windflow and runoff, animal movement, etc, but than you notice that this is true of even those small trails created by a fox or children which only affect a bit of low growing undergrowth so only has a tiny effect on a very localized area. On and on it goes until you run out of explanations.

        I am mostly convinced there is some level of intelligence here and we just can not see it because it is so very different from what we understand as intelligence. But, I may just spend too much time with mushrooms, during the season I always seem to have at least a dozen various mushrooms which I will visit everyday to watch them grow and rot away.

        • luqtas ・ 10 days ago
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          great read: https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S187861462...

          fungi has memory and can decide to not grow on a previous hostile enviroment/direction

          edit: i'm skeptical about the fantastic type of journalism title. the paper points on using fungi electrical reactions to light to drive a robot, not the the otherwise, even less the fungi understanding a "robot" and using it. despite them showing spatial perception on studies about their capabilities

          • pyman ・ 9 days ago

            What the article says is that fungi produces electrical spikes and those spikes may encode information and function like a primitive language to coordinate activity across the network.

            But what if the environment was never hostile and they still avoid it? Some research hints that fungi can react to vibration, like stimuli, but there's no solid proof that mushrooms avoid trails because of it. Still, it feels worth investigating.

        • pyman ・ 9 days ago
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          Looks like they respond to their environment in complex ways. What if mushrooms avoid trails because they feel the vibrations? Maybe they learned that foot traffic = danger. So it grows out of reach.

          You should explore this theory and run some field studies.

          • ofalkaed ・ 9 days ago
            ・ 2 more

            Avoiding the trails can generally explained in fairly simple ways; trail lets in more sunlight so ground near the trail is drier, soil of trails are often heavily compacted which means very dry and hard with very wet and soft on either side from rain water run off, trails funnel air flow down them which affects the moisture levels in the air and soil, etc. The thing here is their knack for growing out of sight of the trail, which is not just a distance thing, many mushrooms are far from inconspicuous and can be seen from a good distance but seem to be able to find those places where they won't be noticed even when growing near a trail.

            So you look at a particular mushroom's requirements for fruiting and look to see how those are met by the place they are growing and try and try to figure out why they fruited in just that spot but not 5 feet over offers the exact same conditions other than that spot 5 feet over being more visible from the trail. On the larger well traveled trails it is fairly easy to find possible explanations, that spot which is not visible from the trail is often the spot protected from how the trail affects airflow/sunlight but things get less clear on the small less traveled trails which have a minimal affect on the local environment.

            You can generally explain away everything with simple biological responses but often it requires quite a few and their all being informed by the others, not just acting in isolation, and at that point it starts looking like some level of intelligence. I am always amazed by the number and variety of mushrooms you find once you leave the trail and you don't even have to go far, 5 or 10 feet is often all it takes.

            Unlikely I will ever do any sort of field study, I am perfectly content with just watching them grow and not having all the answers.

            • pyman ・ 8 days ago

              I like that you saw this with your own eyes and noticed things that are hard to explain rather than just reading about it and settling for someone else's hypothesis. Thanks for sharing!

  • whoknowsidont ・ 10 days ago

    [flagged]

    • literalAardvark ・ 10 days ago

      Still, a child telling their parent to walk isn't actually walking.

      It could easily not even know what walking means, just know that there's food when it tells mom to go to the kitchen.

      I used to ask my grandmother for "plain water" because she always brought me milk. I was very disappointed when I asked someone else for plain water, because I had no idea why grandma's was better.

      • lisper ・ 10 days ago
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        > a child telling their parent to walk isn't actually walking.

        How is that any different from a brain telling its body to walk?

        • adammarples ・ 10 days ago
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          Because the brain has to continually monitor hundreds of inputs like gravity, pressure, balance, visuals, muscle feedback, etc and integrate them with hundreds of outputs to muscles and coordinate the whole thing which keeps changing, that's walking. All this mushroom does is emit a signal that it was already emitting (ie. It's learned nothing) and the robotocists build a walking system around that which handles all the complexity of walking.

          • lisper ・ 10 days ago
            ・ 7 more

            Let me rephrase: what's the difference between a child telling their parent to walk and the conscious part of your brain telling the unconscious part to walk? (BTW, I agree that the mushroom isn't learning anything. My point is just that a child communicating with their parents is not a good analogy.)

            • wizzwizz4 ・ 10 days ago
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              The "conscious part of the brain" gets credit for the walking ability, because it taught "the unconscious part" how to walk, by providing repeated and detailed direction in progressively higher abstractions until full bipedal locomotion was a readily-accessible skill.

              • lisper ・ 10 days ago
                ・ 5 more

                I'm pretty sure that's not true. I think most people learn to walk long before they become aware of being able to walk.

                • wizzwizz4 ・ 9 days ago
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                  Most people have rudimentary language ability, including the ability to express preferences, as they learn to walk. The average one-year-old child is plenty aware of the world.

                  • lisper ・ 9 days ago
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                    Sure. So? That doesn't mean that the conscious part (such as it is at that point) is teaching the unconscious part. You could actually test this by asking a two-year-old who knows how to walk to teach walking to a one-year-old with rudimentary language skills but who can't walk yet. I'd be very surprised if this intervention speeds up the rate at which the one-year-old learns to walk.

                    • wizzwizz4 ・ 8 days ago
                      ・ 2 more

                      Unless you wire the two-year-old's brain up to the one-year-old's so the two-year-old can stimulate the one-year-old's motor cortex, I don't see how that experiment would test my theory. (Maybe I explained it badly.)

                      Adults already show the one-year-old how to walk, encourage the one-year-old to crawl and try to stand, and so on – but the adults aren't teaching the one-year-old how to coordinate muscles. That's all the doing of the one-year-old. Some of it's instinctual (as it is in other mammals), and we have some relevant reflexes once you're actually up and standing (assuming you stay within their domain of efficacy), but overall, walking isn't instinctual for humans.

                      Consider physiotherapy in adults recovering from a nervous system issue. The physiotherapist has to guide the patient through exercises to rebuild motor coordination ability. (Some adults figure this out on their own, invent and practice their own exercises, and breeze through the physiotherapy, but in general physio is long and boring and arduous, because it's very frustrating and doesn't come naturally.) That's the sort of thing infants do on their own volition (with some encouragement from caregivers), but I don't see how it makes sense to say it's not their volition.

                      • lisper ・ 8 days ago

                        Remember the original scenario was "a child telling their parent to walk", so literally using language to communicate a high-level goal to a "lower-level" system.

                        I don't have kids so I have no direct experience with this, but I'm pretty sure that parent's don't actually instruct their kids how to walk. Kids figure it out mostly on their own. Parents might accelerate the process by giving guidance and encouragement, but even that probably is just another feedback channel. The heavy lifting is all in the kid's brain.

                        Contrast that with learning how to play chess. The latter is something that a higher level system really can teach to a lower-level one. Really good chess players eventually develop sub-conscious pattern-matching abilities that are very much like a motor skill, but before that happens a person first has to learn to play chess using slower deliberative methods, and they learn that through language. Other good examples are learning to drive, or fly an airplane, write code. But walking really is different. There's a reason that walking is not taught in preschool. (Physiotherapy is different. And as you yourself point out, some people figure that out on their own too.)

          • whoknowsidont ・ 10 days ago
            ・ 2 more

            >Because the brain has to continually monitor hundreds of inputs like gravity

            Human brains cannot monitor gravity. We're actually very bad at it.

            Also you're failing to understand the scaling involved here, so to speak. I'm actually really not interested in trying to explain this if you can't be bothered with spending a few minutes on how nervous systems work.

            • foldr ・ 10 days ago

              They're obviously referring to the vestibular system. If that system is bad, that only makes the brain's job harder, not easier.

    • ack_inc ・ 10 days ago

      Let's say you start wearing a mushroom as an extra sensory input, and you started doing a dab every time you sensed something from the mushroom

      Would you describe that situation as the mushroom learning to dab?

      • bbarnett ・ 10 days ago

        Hey! What of us with fungi in our intestines.

        They're supposedly stimulating the gut, causing cravings.

        Probably the only case of mushrooms wanting pizza.

mhuffman ・ 11 days ago

Another "fun" science trick here[0] demo here[1]

[0]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Necrobotics

[1]https://www.youtube.com/shorts/_7LUszWRqco

  • wizzwizz4 ・ 10 days ago

    > Besides the necrobotic spider gripper, there are no other robotic concepts under the necrobotics subfield.

    Does dead trout swimming upstream not count? doi:10.1017/S0022112005007925 (open access link: https://www.liaolab.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/10/2006Beal_...)

    • mhuffman ・ 10 days ago

      Has science gone too far, or not far enough? Surely there are business opportunities for reanimating the dead bodies of animals! Where is the mouse jiggler made from an actual dead mouse being controlled by a Raspberry Pi? Or the carcass of a dead dog controlled by an air bladder that will lurch from behind your shrubs and snap at a prowler using zigbee and connected to your security system?

      • taneq ・ 10 days ago

        The Mechanicum will follow your career with much interest. ;)

lioeters ・ 11 days ago

Not sure about this particular experiment, but there is certainly interesting potential in integrating biological organisms (or parts thereof) with larger robotic and mechanical systems.

Recently I saw a video of a turtle which was given a skateboard. It quickly learned how to zip around the house, chasing the cat, etc. It was a simple demostration of how technology, even as primitive as the wheel, can augment the abilities of an organism - especially a living being with sensors (eyes) and neural network (brain).

It also reminds me of the goldfish in a bowl, attached to a small motorized vehicle, which was given the ability to navigate it by swimming in different directions. It soon learned to use this system as an extension of its body, exploring the house, bumping into things like a Roomba with a live brain.

Suppose it's in the same field of exploration as those super-soldiers with Gundam-style body suits and computerized helmets projecting a live data feed to their retinas, maybe eventually embedding neural connectors directly in the head.

  • SequoiaHope ・ 11 days ago

    Regarding the turtle and the goldfish, how can we really say these animals learned how to operate these things? I’m not sure I’d be able to tell the difference between a goldfish just swimming around the tank like normal versus one swimming around the tank with intention.

    • akdor1154 ・ 11 days ago

      I assume a fish that didn’t understand what was going on would just run into walls? Or at most just move towards lights?

      • BalinKing ・ 10 days ago
        ・ 3 more

        The top-level comment indeed says that the fish was bumping into things like a Roomba, so I’m also skeptical....

        • trhway ・ 10 days ago
          ・ 2 more

          judge for yourself https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2nhp7U0rwdM

          • lioeters ・ 10 days ago

            Oh that's a more proper study than the amateur experiment I saw.

            > For this purpose, we trained goldfish to use a Fish Operated Vehicle (FOV), a wheeled terrestrial platform that reacts to the fish’s movement characteristics, location and orientation in its water tank to change the vehicle’s; i.e., the water tank’s, position in the arena.

            > The fish were tasked to “drive” the FOV towards a visual target in the terrestrial environment, which was observable through the walls of the tank, and indeed were able to operate the vehicle, explore the new environment, and reach the target regardless of the starting point, all while avoiding dead-ends and correcting location inaccuracies.

            From fish out of water to new insights on navigation mechanisms in animals - https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S01664...

TylerLives ・ 13 days ago

What could possibly go wrong?

  • xelxebar ・ 10 days ago

    Or right? Reminds me of the Skroderider species of sentient seaweed from Vernor Vinge's "A Fire Upon the Deep".

    • wut-wut ・ 10 days ago

      I came here to say this!

  • Sharlin ・ 10 days ago

    I, for one, welcome our new fungal overlords!

paweladamczuk ・ 10 days ago

I would guess you could achieve similar results with a rat's or cat's brain, but I wonder at which point ethical dilemmas start creeping in. When the fungi learns to ask for food, perhaps?

  • IAmBroom ・ 9 days ago

    Perhaps you are wholly unaware of our past history of experimentation on living rats.

chkaloon ・ 10 days ago

Here I thought ST Discovery had jumped the shark with its whole mycelium navigation plot device.

  • IAmBroom ・ 9 days ago

    Oh, that's still true.

adxl ・ 10 days ago

Before you know it will have a mushroom brain.

BSOhealth ・ 10 days ago

“Autobiography of a human, or how mushrooms learned to build computers after being given primate bodies”

EUSSR ・ 10 days ago

[flagged]

vic_nyc ・ 11 days ago

Anybody else find this creepy?

  • ajmurmann ・ 11 days ago

    Just don't give them six wheels! Hexapodia is the key insight!

  • zoom6628 ・ 11 days ago

    Very creepy however it is living proof that Trump is real and not CGI.