Emergent networks: A slime mold simulation

In a world where news are delivered in an instant around the world, where the population of a network service is around twice the one of the USA and where an natural catastrophe can lead to a chain reaction a reliable infrastructure is the key to survival. This insight has motivated a diverse group of researchers to seek understanding of the resilient infrastructure of nature surrounding our everyday life. One life-form has especially attracted attention in this context: The slime mold. This little unicellular organism is able to create, without any central control, transport networks with extraordinary properties. Biological experiments by Tero et al [28] have shown, that the slime mold Physarum polycephalum could create a network complex enough to compete with the railway system in the area of Tokyo. Such and similar results have spawned a number of projects aiming at the simulation of the slime mold’s behavior [27, 9, 26, 12]. Yet at present no universal explanation has emerged. The present paper tackles this problem. The slime molds behavior is analyzed and general rules are extracted. Further a model effort in the Cellular Potts Model [8] and the CompuCell3D [6] framework is described. Consequently the simulation is compared to biological experiments. The highlight of the paper will be a presentation of the slime mold simulation on a map of the Netherlands.