<aside> 🔎 Focusing on 3 types of Energy Organization: Decentralized, Self-organized, Adaptive

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1. Decentralized

• Definition

Slime Molds

Slime mold Physarum polycephalum: "a single-celled organism that looks a lot like a splat of thick yellow paint. Neither animal nor plant, it lives in damp forests. It creeps across surfaces by oozing forward in fingerlike projections." (Hoff, 2020) It "crawl at speeds from 0.1 to a few centimetres per hour...In nature, slime moulds are found on organic substrates like tree bark or forest soil where they feed on microorganisms such as bacteria or fungi" (Boussard, 2019)

Relationship to Decentralization

Slime Molds communicate individually to one another by merging cells and transferring memory and experience. Through this, they are able to construct efficient transport network and collective overcome obstacles and navigate through complex environments. Slime molds act individually when food is abundant, and congregate and start moving as a single body when food is in short supply. Individual slime molds also spread out strands to explore, creating a decentralized system of information seeking, the strands that does not achieve efficient routes to food source are then killed. On many different scales, slime mold act in decentralized methods to achieve collective goals.

Decision-Making & Work ability

Slime moulds are a non-neural organism documented to have learning and memory abilities. (Boussard, 2019)

• it is easy to manipulate and observe
• genetically similar characteristics can be obtained by cutting a single cell into multiples.
• demonstrates key aspects of complext decision-making
  • can navigate through a maze and other complex environment
  • can construct efficient transport networks
  • can interact and cooperate with congeners
  • can anticipate periodic events
  • optimize nutrient-intake.
  • capable of habituation - a form of learning

Transport Networks:

Once food sources have been located, the many branches slime moulds has sent out die back, leaving only the most efficient route between food source nodes.

"By arranging pieces of oatmeal on a Petri dish to represent railway stations, researchers at the University of Hokkaido in Japan successfully grew a slime mould model of the Tokyo rail system in 2010. Since then, slime has mapped the optimum transport networks of numerous cities, as well as the Silk Road and a full global trade route."