Amoeba, Bitcoin And Traveling Salesmen

Sometimes life surprises you. Something happens, or you read or hear something that makes you reconsider things you thought were unquestionably true. These are precious moments, as they shine a fresh light in places that were previously closed in your mind.

_{Image by TheDigitalArtist - source: Pixabay}

And sometimes it is life itself that does the surprising. I'm a crypto enthousiast, like most of you, just an average crypto-brother, so to speak. I love the idea of decentralizing power and making money real again, but I'm not a programmer or an expert of cryptography or other types of computer security. Still, it's clear to me that crypto-currency's main challenges are scaling and efficiency, and that they are strongly intertwined; more efficiency allows for better and larger scalability. And in the efficiency department life has given us a valuable gift, or so it seems to me at least.

A couple of days ago I came across the video I'll link at the bottom, with the tantalizing title "Why This Amoeba Will Change Bitcoin & CryptoCurrency Forever!". Now, what's this? Amoeba are tiny organisms, how on earth could they be beneficial for cryptocurrencies? Well, it turns out theyr could very well help make the very hard calculations needed for cryptographic security exponentially more efficient and faster.

If you've ever heard about the travelling salesman problem, you know this is a very hard mathematical problem to solve, for which there's no function or algorithm. Here's the problem:

The travelling salesman problem (TSP) asks the following question: "Given a list of cities and the distances between each pair of cities, what is the shortest possible route that visits each city and returns to the origin city?" It is an NP-hard problem in combinatorial optimization, important in operations research and theoretical computer science.
_{source: Wikipedia}

_{Image by TheDigitalArtist - source: Pixabay}

This is basically a problem of optimization, something we're very interested in when it comes to blockchain technology. There's no algorithm, so the only way to calculate the most efficient route is to try calculate the distances of all possible routes, divided by two to exclude the routes already calculated that are in the reverse direction. What makes this so hard is that with each additional city, the problem becomes exponentially harder. With N cities, there are N-1 factorial, divided by two routes to consider; with only 10 cities that is already 18,1440 calculations to make.

But now there's this amoeba that comes to the rescue. For a full explanation, please watch the video, as a lot of it is best done visually. The essence however is that this creature shows binary behavior, it does two things: it moves away from light, and it moves toward food. It likes to eat, and preferably in the dark. Now scientists have found a way to use this behavior to solve the traveling salesman problem super fast; this amoeba powered method even made a better design for a Japanese subway network than the professionals hired to do the job. This is very early stages yet, but I invite you to watch it, because it is interesting for the unification of biology and computer science alone.

_{Why This Amoeba Will Change Bitcoin & CryptoCurrency Forever!}

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_{source: Wikipedia}

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