ABOUT MUSHROOMS AND OPTIMIZATION
In 2000 Professor Toshiyuki Nakagaki, a biologist and a physicist at Hokkaido University in Japan, found out that mushrooms (fungi) can plan transportation maps as well as professional engineers – and much faster. Toshiyuki took a map of Japan, and put bits of food on the points representing large cities. He put the mushroom on Tokyo, and waited 23 hours, the time the mushroom needed to build linear webs to all the food scraps. The result was an almost perfect replica of the existing rail map around Tokyo.
Additional studies confirmed that mushrooms can learn, memorize routes, and replicate knowledge. They can navigate mazes, and even bypass obstacles. There are thousands species of mushrooms on our planet and many of them are as impressive.
Ascomycota is one of these mushrooms and our inspiration for the ASCOMY platform.
