Slime moulds are so cool. Astronomers model dark matter with them and applied mathematicians have used them to verify the efficiency of the Tokyo rail network.
A while back I made a WebGL simulation of the slime mould Physarum polycephalum based on a blog and paper I read, after seeing an old Sebastian Lague video on the topic.
It’s bundled with Webpack—an ancient bit of tech—so I can’t include it in this page directly, but you can see it in action here.
Move around the slime mould by dragging the mouse and notice how the mould searches out for food and other slime moulds (in this case, copies of itself…) and builds efficient networks to connect them!
You can pause the simulation by clicking.
If you’re interested, you can also look at the Github repo.