[todd8]

The nervous system of jellyfish, the oldest multi-organ animals (0.5 billion years) [1], is primitive. The neurons are arranged into a nerve net with hints of limited central actions. It doesn't surprise me that something akin to annealing is taking place since that form of search is very simple and could be imagined to take place with very simple distributed actions, having just one global, time-varying parameter T, known as the temperature [2].

Wouldn't almost any other effective search technique be more complex to implement in a very simple nerve net? If jellyfish were found to utilize say genetic optimization based search then I would really be surprised.

For more information (than you probably want to know) about the nervous system of jellyfish see [3].

[1] http://societyofbiologyblog.org/the-peculiarities-of-the-jel...

[2] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Simulated_annealing

[3] http://jeb.biologists.org/content/214/8/1215.full