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?

Slime Cam