Biolith Drift

Physarum polycephalum, a brainless organism composed of a single multinucleated cell, constructs transport networks that rival human-engineered infrastructure. Placed on a map of Tokyo with oat flakes at station locations, the slime mold reproduces the metropolitan rail network within forty-eight hours — optimizing for both efficiency and fault tolerance without a single neuron.

This is not metaphor. The organism computes. Its protoplasmic veins pulse with shuttle streaming, a hydraulic logic that solves shortest-path, minimum spanning tree, and multi-objective optimization problems. Jones (2010) formalized this behaviour as a multi-agent particle model: simple agents depositing chemical trails, sensing and turning, producing emergent networks of startling sophistication.