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. 2022 Jun 12;24(6):819. doi: 10.3390/e24060819

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© 2022 by the authors.

Licensee MDPI, Basel, Switzerland. This article is an open access article distributed under the terms and conditions of the Creative Commons Attribution (CC BY) license (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/).

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Similar strategies are seen in diverse biological systems at all levels for navigating problem spaces. One example is spreading out and then pulling back from regions that are non-attractors. (A) Physarum slime molds spreading throughout a maze and then pulling back from every location except the shortest path between two food sources (taken with permission from [144]). (B) Neurons often prune back after forming a set of network connections (taken with permission from [145]). (C) Evolutionary exploration finds high fitness peaks, and then populations pull back from the valleys. Panel (C) by Jeremy Guay of Peregrine Creative.