Tuesday, April 19, 2005

Intelligent bacteria?

The bacteria are the smallest living creature in this world. They do the same things humans do with the setup they have. They use chemicle signal system to know about things, like sex of another, and do things as 'aving it. So they are intelligent in their own way. Eg. "the deadly Pseudomonas aeruginosa can make a living by infecting a wide variety of animal and plant tissues, each of which is a very different type of environment in which to live and find sustenance."

Cooperation and altruism

These guys group together to make a colony and move about seeking food sources. And if a virus attacks them some of them commit suicide to save others.

Mousetraps, learning and language

Boffins say just like the game of Mousetrap where a chain reaction occurs to perform a certain task, the bacteria uses the system in search of food. If a food particle brushes against the cell, then a molecular chain reaction occurs to perform the task of enveloping the food particle to digest it. It is just like me smelling a kebab and going down the road seeking the smell with a mitfull of money init?

Single bacterium has different chemicle reactions like that for various purposes. These systems can be replicated by the bacterium if needed. So if there is a lack of nutrients bacterium can activate a system to make the nutrient attract towords him. And the system is replicated to have more c0pies of itself. How do they know how to do that. That is learning just like me.

When they are starving they send stress signals to eachother and form a harder exterior wall to survive the food shortage and come out later alive. They can absorb information from outside, analyse it, signal each other about it and vote on it and then individuals take action about it.

The bofins are trying to copy this system into a neural network in computers. Simply system works like this. Say there is a picure of a human being given to the puter. Ask the qestion whether it is a male or female. Now the whole photo is digitised into a big number. this number is fed into the front line of cells in the neural net, such that each cell gets a digit of the number. These cells are programed to do a function like add or substract then pass the whole or part of the result to the next level of cells. The numbers go thrugh the system and finally come out to the output cells with the answer female as 1 and/or male as 0. At first the answers are random but the system can learn with the programmer adjusting the system and the system itself learning.

The above system and bacterium system are not exactly right. There are four main factors which govern these processes.

1) In a bacterium all thses processes work parallely to one another where as in a computer they are done serially. So we need lots of sub-computers to work together.

2) All these processes have to be logically analysed and the result sent to the individual cells. Computer and bacterium seems to be able to do it.

3) These processes in bacterium are increased in strength by making multiple copies of itself on the run.

4) Crosstalk is a must in bacteria as the different processes not linked to eachother can talk to eachother as the processes are performed. This is called the associate memory. Like me in Sally Army 7.45 AM and I feel hungry and drooling as breakfast opens at 8.


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