Thirty Seven Things to Do with Live Slime Mould

Abstract

Slime mould Physarum polycephalum is a large single cell capable for distributed sensing, concurrent information processing, parallel computation and decentralised actuation. The ease of culturing and experimenting with Physarum makes this slime mould an ideal substrate for real-world implementations of unconventional sensing and computing devices. In the last decade the Physarum became a swiss knife of the unconventional computing: give the slime mould a problem it will solve it. We provide a concise summary of what exact computing and sensing operations are implemented with live slime mould. The Physarum devices range from morphological processors for computational geometry to experimental archeology tools, from self-routing wires to memristors, from devices approximating a shortest path to analog physical models of space exploration.

Structural machines and slime mould computation

“…Physarum machines can solve dozens of problems from computational geometry, graph optimization and control. They also can be used as organic electronic elements (Adamatzky 2015(Adamatzky , 2016. The structural machine might form a platform for developing Physarum programming languages, compilers and interface between human operators and the slime mould (Schumann et al 2014;Siccardi and Adamatzky 2015;Pancerz and Schumann 2016).…”

“…This is why it is important to develop abstractions of the information ∃ m ∀n > m (Q n, Q m ∈ Out ⇒ Q n = Q m ) processing on the actin filaments. While designing experimental laboratory prototypes of computing devices from living slime mould P. polycephalum (Adamatzky 2015(Adamatzky , 2016, we found that actin networks might play a key role in distributed sensing, decentralized information processing and parallel decision-making in a living cell Adamatzky and Mayne 2015;Mayne, Adamatzky, and Jones 2015). The actin-automata exhibit a wide a range of mobile and stationary patterns, which were later used to design computational models of quantum (Siccardi and Adamatzky 2015) and Boolean (Siccardi, Tuszynski, and Adamatzky 2016) gates implementable on actin fibre, as well as realization of universal computation with cyclic tag systems (Martinez, Adamatzky, and Mclntosh 2015).…”

Coupled Physarum-Inspired Memristor Oscillators for Neuron-like Operations

“…Details can be found in literature such as the book on Physarum machines [3] and the "bible" of slime mould computing [4]. An extensive range of experimental laboratory prototypes of Physarumbased computing devices has been developed, and few ex-amples include shortest path via annealing and chemotaxis, Towers of Hanoi via shortest path problem, travelling salesman problem, spanning trees, approximation of transport networks, Boolean logical gates, ballistic logical gates, optoelectronic gates, and micro-fluid gates with tactile inputs, all briefly overviewed in [5].…”

An Approach to Building Musical Bioprocessors with Physarum polycephalum Memristors

“…Some examples are colour sensing (Adamatzky 2013), robot manoeuvring (Tsuda et al 2007), and logic gate schemes (Whiting et al 2014, Adamatzky & Schubert 2014, Adamatzky et al 2016. See (Adamatzky 2015) for a survey of P. polycephalum prototypes. Such a span of experimental proofs has led to one P. polycephalum advocate describing the organism as the "Swiss knife of the unconventional computing: give the slime mould a problem it will solve it" (Adamatzky 2015, p.1).…”