Experiment — slime mould
Physarum — emergent transport networks
Blind, memoryless agents that only communicate through a shared pheromone map — and yet a network of veins emerges and reorganizes live in front of you.
Initializing the simulation…
WebGPU isn't available here
This demo needs WebGPU (recent Chrome/Edge, or Firefox with the flag enabled) to run tens of thousands of agents live on the GPU. Here's a recording of a real lab run instead.
What you're looking at
Each agent is blind and has no memory: it only sees three points ahead of it on a shared pheromone map, turns toward the strongest point, moves forward, then deposits its own trace. No agent knows the network — the transport network you see emerging (filaments that connect, reinforce, reorganize) is a pure stigmergy effect: indirect communication through the shared environment, with no plan and no central coordinator.
Physarum agent-network model after Jeff Jones (Artificial Life, 2010).