Reaching your life goals as a single-celled organism

1/2 images 1 of 2 images or videos - How do simple creatures manage to move to a specific place? Artificial intelligence and a physical model from TU Wien can now explain this. How is it possible to move in the desired direction without a brain or nervous system? Single-celled organisms apparently manage this feat without any problems: for example, they can swim towards food with the help of small flagellar tails. How these extremely simply built creatures manage to do this was not entirely clear until now. However, a research team at TU Wien (Vienna) has now been able to simulate this process on the computer: They calculated the physical interaction between a very simple model organism and its environment. This environment is a liquid with a non-uniform chemical composition, it contains food sources that are unevenly distributed. The simulated organism was equipped with the ability to process information about food in its environment in a very simple way. With the help of a machine learning algorithm, the information processing of the virtual being was then modified and optimised in many evolutionary steps.