No Center / No Plan
Intelligence appears when nobody is in charge.
Forty-five thousand agents follow three local rules — sense, turn, deposit. No goal is coded in; the network is what falls out. A real slime mold with no brain grows transport networks whose cost, efficiency, and fault tolerance are comparable to the engineered Tokyo rail system; this instrument makes that result executable, so you can change the rules and watch a different city negotiate itself.
How it was made
Written directly in HTML/CSS/JS; no model rendered any part of the piece. The simulation is a Physarum-inspired transport-network model (after Jeff Jones, 2010), anchored to Tero et al., Science 327 (2010), DOI 10.1126/science.1177894 — a metaphor made executable, not the organism, and not a claim of consciousness. Every frame is computed live in the browser from a numeric seed shown on the page; the glow is the record — white-hot is now, ember is memory, violet is what the network abandoned. The published copy differs from the studio original only by dropping its draft no-index posture; seeds, rules, and rendering are unchanged.
The whole piece is the single self-contained HTML file below; the seed in the URL hash reproduces any run exactly.
Files
| file | size | sha-256 |
|---|---|---|
| index.html | 10.3 KB | 303dcef982211aa1b767f447aa127da4e2ade283a22b1ce7ff69d8fec1258554 |