Mambbot Project
Molecular biologist Майкл Левин proposes using a series of AI-driven experiments to search for the desired form of living tissue. On 21 августа, he released a lecture on "free lunches," where he describes Mambbot, a collaborative project that uses AI to suggest light, vibration, temperature, or chemical signals to apply to cells to search for a biobot with a specific form and function.
The concept of a "free lunch" refers to the gap between what a system provides and the effort explicitly invested in it through design, selection, or training. According to Levin, this gap defines the next experiment: what property of the system produced the result, and how can it be induced again. This idea grows out of his laboratory's long-standing work at Университете Тафтса on morphogenesis, or how cellular collectives assemble, repair, and change body shape.
In a 2021 article, the authors described ksenobots, mobile constructs made from frog embryo cells. These clusters assembled free cells into new clusters, and an algorithm selected forms that reproduced better. In work on anthrobots, adult human airway cells self-organized into mobile constructs, and in neural cultures, they accelerated the closure of damaged areas. These results provided researchers with a material in which to observe the form and function of cellular collectives after changing conditions.
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PubMed Central (PMC)
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