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The ever amazing slime mold is not the only way to solve complex compute problems without performing calculations. There is another: soap film. Unfortunately for soap film it isn’t nearly as photogenic as slime mold, all we get are boring looking pictures, but the underlying idea is still fascinating and ten times less spooky.
As a quick introduction we’ll lean on Long Ouyang, who has really straightforward explanation of how soap film works in Approaching P=NP: Can Soap Bubbles Solve The Steiner Tree Problem In Polynomial.
It’s computers, so playing the role of the motivating graph problem we have the Steiner tree problem, which Ouyang explains as:
Find the minimum spanning tree for a bunch of vertices, given that you can add additional points.
Soap helps solve this problem because:
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