A group of researchers led by Toshiyuki Nakagaki from the Hokkaido University in Japan, placed Physarum polycephalum in a petri-dish scattered with oat flakes. The position of food scraps was deliberately placed to replicate the locations of some of the most visited site in Tokyo. In the first few hours, the slime mold’s size grew exponentially, and it branched out through the entire edible map. Within a few days, the size of its branches started to shrink, and the slime mold established a complex branching network between the oats on the petri-dish. Despite growing and expanding without a central coordination system like the brain, the mould had re-created an interconnected network made of slimes that looks almost exactly like the efficient, well-designed Tokyo subway system.
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