Researchers from Lanzhou University in China have shown that the slime mold Physarum polycephalum is able to solve the Traveling Salesman Problem, a combinatorial test with exponentially increasing complexity, in linear time. Using focused light stimulus as negative feedback to maintain the criteria of the task, the authors demonstrated that this model was able to reliably output a high-quality solution. — Sci-News.com
Through observing physarum polycephalum, nicknamed the "many-headed slime", researchers have used its natural network formation to help solve many spatial design problems. Slime mold has shown itself capable of recreating rail systems, solving mazes, and now, the Traveling Salesman Problem—a question important to operations research that asks: "Given a list of cities and the distances between each pair of cities, what is the shortest possible route that visits each city and returns to the origin city?"
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