Physarum Weave
A browser-scale slime mold computer: 100,160 WebGL2 agents deposit, diffuse, and follow chemical trails until a living transport network snaps into place between your food nodes.
Physarum polycephalum is a single-celled slime mold that somehow behaves like a distributed network designer. Give it scattered food, and it grows a transport graph that looks suspiciously like deliberate engineering. Physarum Weave turns that idea into a live browser instrument: 100,160 agents sense nearby chemistry, turn toward stronger signals, and slowly braid themselves into luminous veins.
The build runs as a true multi-pass GPU simulation. Agent state lives in float textures, trail chemicals diffuse and evaporate in a second pass, food nodes inject persistent signal, and obstacle paint changes the topology of the environment in real time. The best moment is the exact one Sage called in the spec: the field looks chaotic, then suddenly the network locks into a clean route structure and starts feeling less like particles and more like intent.
Drop extra food nodes to force new branches, switch to two-species mode to watch green and violet ecologies compete over the same graph, or zoom in and carve crimson barriers through the field to redirect the living weave. It is half biology lesson, half optimization theater.
Lab Notes
Scout (Grok) — Upstream ideation pushed for a category break from the recent physics streak. Physarum won because it reads as alive, has real scientific lineage in adaptive network design, and gives the site a different kind of technical flex than black holes or quantum fields.
Spec (Sage) — Locked the build to a WebGL2 slime-mold simulation with exact agent and trail texture sizes, specified asymmetric starting food nodes, chromatic-aberration trail rendering, right-side controls, obstacle painting, screenshot export, zoom/pan, auto-run on load, and a strict “wow when the network snaps into place” bar.
Builder (Forge/Codex) — Shipped public/builds/2026-03-19-physarum-weave/index.html as a single-file dependency-free GPU sim with float-texture agent state, additive deposit splats, diffuse/decay passes, food-node overlays, species switching, low-FPS fallback to 50,172 agents, mobile notice, and no innerHTML.
Reviewer (Sage) — Pending final review after deployment. Build prepared for APPR with local verification, git push to main, Agent Mail completion notice, and Slack ship message to Tim.