Donald Hoffman

There's E. coli bacteria.

What I've read is that it swims along and there's some amino acid or something that it's eating.

And as long as there's a good gradient of that thing, it keeps going in the direction it's going and eating the stuff.

But if things start going south and it's not getting the amino acid or whatever it is it's eating, this flagellum that it's using to move forward, it turns it in the other direction, which makes it – it's like a random turn.

So it just rotates the other way and that gives it like a random – so it's like a random orientation generator.

It orients.

It's a completely new generation, new direction.

And then it starts going.

And if it's good, then it goes.

So that's a search mechanism.

It's very stupid, but it works for the E. coli.

Now, does E. coli necessarily have persistence?

If a person- Well, I agree with you on that.

My question was different.

From E. coli's perspective, I was thinking through the headset of E. coli.

So E. coli has its own headset.

And I'm just wondering for E. coli, see, it may not need to have this persistence notion because all it needs to know, I'm happy, I'm eating.

And I completely agree with you on that.

I was just raising the question, could we come up with a game that was so simple, that was so trivial, that in some sense, persistence was irrelevant.

I mean, you either are told bad or good.