Physarum polycephalum is a single cell with many nuclei, no neurons and no brain. Place oat flakes where the cities around Tokyo sit and it still weaves a tube network whose efficiency and fault tolerance come close to the engineered rail map, as the Nakagaki group reported in 2010. The agent model here rebuilds that with 2600 probes on a 200×120 lattice: each probe sniffs the slime trail in three directions ahead, turns toward the strongest, crawls there and lays down more slime. The faster the trail fades, the fewer routes survive, until only the busiest remain.
Physarum polycephalum is a single cell with many nuclei, no neurons and no brain. Place oat flakes where the cities around Tokyo sit and it still weaves a tube network whose efficiency and fault tolerance come close to the engineered rail map, as the Nakagaki group reported in 2010. The agent model here rebuilds that with 2600 probes on a 200×120 lattice: each probe sniffs the slime trail in three directions ahead, turns toward the strongest, crawls there and lays down more slime. The faster the trail fades, the fewer routes survive, until only the busiest remain.
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