PhyChip: Growing computers with slime mould

Abstract

Slime mould Physarum polycephalum is a large single cell capable of distributed sensing, concurrent information processing, parallel computation, and decentralised actuation. The ease of culturing and experimenting with Physarum makes this slime mould an ideal substrate for real-world implementations of unconventional sensing and computing devices. In the last decade Physarum has become a popular inspiration for mathematical and algorithmic models and philosophical concepts of unconventional computing: give the slime mould a problem and it will solve it. We provide a concise summary of computing and sensing operations implemented with live slime mould and evaluate the feasibility of slime mould-based computing.