Multi-agent Slime Mould Computing: Mechanisms, Applications and Advances

The giant single-celled slime mould Physarum polycephalum has inspired developments in bio-inspired computing and unconventional computing substrates since the start of this century. This is primarily due to its simple component parts and the distributed nature of the ‘computation’ which it approximates during its growth, foraging and adaptation to a changing environment. Slime mould functions as a living embodied computational material which can be influenced by external stimuli. The goal of exploiting this material behaviour for unconventional computation led to the development of a simple multi-agent approach to the approximation of slime mould behaviour. The basis of the model is a simple dynamical pattern formation mechanism which exhibits self-organised formation and subsequent adaptation of collective transport networks. The system exhibits emergent properties such as relaxation and minimisation and it can be considered as a virtual material, influenced by the external application of spatial concentration gradients. In this chapter we give an overview of this multi-agent approach to unconventional computing. We describe its computational mechanisms and different generic application domains, together with concrete example applications of material computation. We examine the potential exploitation of the approach for computational geometry, path planning, combinatorial optimisation, data smoothing and statistical approximation applications.