Cooperation

[ellestra]

So I'm almost done with work - all that's left is tidying some computer stuff - and I moved - old stuff is out of the apartment and new is in (funny how I couldn't get myself to do it for half a year and now it's all done in a week but nothing forces you to action like a deadline). In last couple of months our lab suddenly expaned. It's so weird to think that half a year ago I was all alone and now there is a group of people I had to leave instructions for. Tell them what they should do while I'm gone. It's going to be fun when our boss will have to explain things to them (he's very nice but his explanations sometimes leave you more confused). And I wonder how he will do with sample tracking. Luckily among  all of them they should be able to get things done more or less properly. I hope. Well, at least I had someone to hand my yeast to, so the experiment will be almost ready when I come back (it takes 40 days to run).

Speaking of experimenting on yeast - they just turned into a proto-multicellular organism in lab. See, evolution of cooperation is just a matter of time and right selection pressure.

In another simulation of cooperation a swarm of robots is behaving socially - they do all kinds of stuff together: disperse to explore their surroundings, play "follow the leader", or even mimic foraging behaviour. Right now they are just Kilobots but just make them a little smaller and the gray goo will eat us all.

And now it's time for optical illusion