Thirty eight things to do with live slime mould

TL;DR

This paper reviews the diverse computational and sensing applications of Physarum polycephalum, highlighting its versatility as a biological substrate for unconventional computing and real-world sensing devices.

Contribution

It provides a comprehensive summary of the various operations and devices implemented with live slime mould, showcasing its potential in unconventional computing.

Findings

Physarum can perform distributed sensing and parallel computation.

It has been used to create morphological processors and self-routing wires.

Physarum-based devices can solve shortest path problems and model space exploration.

Abstract

Slime mould \emph{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.