Terry
What does that sentence mean? Could you explain? [text] A bacterium is so small that its sensors alone can give it no indication of the direction that a good or bad chemical is coming from. To overcome this problem, the bacterium uses time to help it deal with space. The bacterium is not interested in how much of a chemical is present at any given moment, but rather in whether that concentration is increasing or decreasing. After all, if the bacterium swam in a straight line simply because the concentration of a desirable chemical was high, it might travel away from chemical nirvana, not toward it, depending on the direction it's pointing. The bacterium solves this problem in an ingenious manner: as it senses its world, one mechanism registers what conditions are like right now, and another records how things were a few moments ago. The bacterium will swim in a straight line as long as the chemicals it senses seem better now than those it sensed a moment ago. If not, it's preferable to change course. [my question] the bacterium uses time to help it deal with space. What does that mean? I don't know what it means by bacteria using time to deal with space because bacteria don't know where good or bad chemicals come from.
22 Thg 05 2020 01:44
Câu trả lời · 4
The way the author has phrased this is a bit too clever for my liking, but here's what they mean: The bacterium has to be able to experience more than one moment in time at once (that is to say it has to have some equivalent to short term memory) so it can compare the current conditions to past conditions. It's moving through a single region of space at a time but constantly comparing more than one instance in time, even if it's just a moment ago: Is the concentration of what I'm looking for higher now (in this space) or was it higher a moment ago (in that spot where I no longer am)?
22 tháng 5 năm 2020
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