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.
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.
Not a true fungi; today I learned. Thanks!
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.
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
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.
You should explore this theory and run some field studies.
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.
Does dead trout swimming upstream not count? doi:10.1017/S0022112005007925 (open access link: https://www.liaolab.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/10/2006Beal_...)
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.
> 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...
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Fire_Upon_the_Deep#Skroders/...
https://www.wikiwand.com/en/articles/Scavengers_Reign
This limited series blew my mind. Total master piece.
In favor of integrating fungus with robotics(i think).