Great macro photography gallery of slime moulds by Barry Webb. Many gorgeous images. Via Iain Claridge
Formerly classified as Fungi, Slime Moulds are no longer considered part of that group. (Wikipedia)
Here is a quote from Ways of Being, by James Bridle.
In 2018 the same slime mould, Physarum polycephalum, showed that it was able to solve the traveling salesman problem in linear time, meaning that as the problem increased in size, it kept making the most efficient decisions at every juncture. Using the same method as the Tokyo rail experiment, researchers at Lanzhou University in China placed scraps of food in the place of cities and used beams of light to keep it from repeating connections. They showed that the mould took only twice as long to solve a map of eight cities as it did to solve a map of four cities – despite there being almost a thousand times more possible routes. In short, the slime mould easily completed a task that the most powerful computers in the world – and humans – absolutely suck at.
I’ve been a longtime fan of Barry Webb’s slime. His photos inspired this AI-assisted collection of imaginary slime molds and double helix fantasies:
https://cantonbecker.com/generative-art/pseudo-slime-molds/