One scene stopped me. In a documentary called The Thinking Game, a DeepMind AI agent is learning the Atari game Breakout from scratch. Paddle at the bottom of the screen, ball bouncing up, wall of bricks to break.
At first it plays randomly. After some practice it gets competent. It tracks the ball, keeps it alive, chips through bricks. The apparent trade-off: the better you track the ball the more bricks you break. One miss costs you a life.
Then the agent stops playing that way. It carves a narrow path up the left side of the wall, slips the ball into the space above the bricks and lets it ricochet between the ceiling and the wall. The bricks destroy themselves. The paddle barely has to move.
I rewound it. Trade-offs were on my mind from my own work. This felt related.
The move was in the game all along. Human players miss it because they keep moving the paddle out of habit.
I named it tunneling. Then I started looking for it everywhere.
Tunneling is finding out that a trade-off you thought was mandatory was optional all along.
Today I went looking for tunnels in nature. Here are eight.
Mitochondria (power plants inside cells). Mitochondria are tiny structures inside your cells. They make the energy your body runs on. Two billion years ago, cells hit a wall. They grew bigger. Their insides outgrew the outer layer that produced their energy. Bigger cells starved.
Then one cell swallowed a bacterium that was good at making energy. Instead of digesting it, the two struck a deal. The bacterium became the first mitochondria. Now the energy plants lived inside, growing with the cell. Complex life descends from that event.
C4 photosynthesis. Plants need carbon dioxide from the air to make food. They get it by opening tiny holes in their leaves. Those same holes leak water. Eat or drink.
C4 plants like corn, sugarcane and many grasses restructured the leaf. They grab carbon dioxide in one set of cells and pass it to another set deeper inside, where the food-making happens in a concentrated space. They keep the holes open less often and lose less water. The architecture solved the eat-or-drink trade-off.
The lens in the eye. A simple light-sensitive patch forces a trade. A wide opening catches lots of light but the image blurs. A pinhole sharpens the image but starves it of light.
The lens fixed that. A curved transparent structure bends the incoming light so a wide opening produces a sharp image. Lenses evolved independently in very different animals. Proof the tunnel was there to be found more than once.
Bats flying in the dark. Night flying should be impossible for something that eats insects. Moths are invisible in the dark.
Bats built a different sense. They make high-pitched clicks too high for humans to hear, then listen to the echoes bouncing back. The echoes tell them the shape of the world around them, including every moth. A huge piece of the ecosystem (nighttime flying insects, almost no predators) was waiting for something that gave up on seeing.
Octopuses that dropped the shell. Most mollusks solved predators with shells. Shells work, shells are heavy, shells slow you down.
Octopuses dropped the shell and became soft and fast. To survive without armor they evolved skin that changes color and texture in milliseconds. Camouflage replaces armor.
Lichen (two organisms acting as one). Fungi grip bare rock and survive harsh conditions. They can’t make their own food. Algae make food from sunlight. They die on bare rock.
Lichen is a fungus paired with algae, living as one organism. Together they colonize arctic tundra, desert surfaces and newly exposed stone that neither could survive alone. Pioneer organisms.
Tardigrades that hit pause. Complex animals need water, mild temperatures and stable chemistry to stay alive. The more complex you are, the narrower your window. Tardigrades broke the rule.
As their environment dries out, they replace the water in their cells with a sugar that sets like glass. It locks every tiny part in place. They stop being alive without dying. In that paused state they survive near-absolute-zero temperatures, pressures greater than the deep ocean, the vacuum of space and radiation that would kill a human hundreds of times over. Add water and they come back. The chemistry itself is the sensor.
Language. Individual learning is powerful, slow and dies with you. Demonstration transfers some skills to whoever is physically there.
Written language freed knowledge from the person who discovered it. Anything one person learns can now be distributed across everyone alive and everyone not yet born. Depth and breadth stopped being a trade-off.
Most trade-offs are real. Some aren’t.
🕹️
What trade-off might you be able to tunnel through?
