Modeling Utopia with Slime Mould

Over the course of 10 days in the IXDM lab in Basel, Switzerland, I investigated whether the slime mould Physarum polycephalum could be used to model how resources are shared within a housing cooperative. A single-cell organism often found foraging for food on forest floors, slime moulds tend to organize themselves around food sources in a way which resembles a decentralized network. Therefore, could we gain any insights in how a coop would distribute their resources by observing how slime moulds distribute food "resources" within their cell walls? This is an ongoing project with weekly experiments, the results of which are still forthcoming.