Emergence of morphological order in the network formation of Physarum polycephalum

An adaptive and robust biological network based on the vacant-particle transportation model

“…Under these same conditions, real Physarum will sometimes display a cauliflower-like pattern that is composed of branches with massive marginal areas (Adamatzky, 2008a, b). This pattern suggests a global control in which information propagating throughout a whole body plays a role in complex pattern formation (Shirakawa and Gunji, 2007). These observations bring up the question as to how the interplay between local and global information occurs in biological systems.…”

An associative learning experiment using the plasmodium of Physarum polycephalum

“…The recent studies on the computational ability of the plasmodium revealed that the organism or the experimental system using it can find a solution in a maze [16,17,12], optimize a network between multiple nodes [15,13,23], and solve some other graph theoretical problems [22,24]. The solutions for these problems are given by the arrangement of tubes.…”

Structuring precedes extension in percolating Physarum polycephalum networks

“…This transportation network (see e.g. [1]) has been shown to possess the ability to solve complex tasks like maze solving [2], network optimization in terms of path length and efficiency (globally [3,4] and also locally as it was found to prefer optimized network motifs [5]). Furthermore, P. polycephalum is even thought to possess certain learning capabilities [6][7][8].…”