A billion-year-old organism with no brain may hold lessons for Israel’s approach to resilient, decentralised technology

In 2010, researchers at Hokkaido University placed oat flakes on a wet surface, arranged to mirror the positions of major cities around Tokyo. They introduced Physarum polycephalum—a yellow slime mould, a single cell with no brain and no nervous system—and watched as it extended its tendrils outward, probing, retreating, and reorganising itself. When it was finished, the network it had built bore an uncanny resemblance to the Tokyo rail system, one of the most efficient transportation networks ever designed by human engineers.

This was not a fluke. The experiment has since been replicated with maps of the United Kingdom, the Iberian Peninsula, the United States, and more than a dozen other regions, each time producing networks that rival those painstakingly optimised by teams of engineers over decades. A creature that predates the evolution of neurons was approximating solutions to the Steiner tree problem—a class of network optimisation that remains computationally intractable at scale.

The implications for artificial intelligence are profound. But they carry a particular resonance for Israel—a country whose technological identity has been forged by the imperative to build systems that are decentralised, adaptive, and resilient under pressure.

Slime mould has no central processor. It computes through chemistry—pulsating rhythmically, with cytoplasm flowing through a tubular network that thickens toward food and thins away from it. Through local feedback loops alone, the organism converges on globally optimal solutions. It can “remember” food locations, anticipate periodic environmental changes, and weigh risk against reward—all without a single neuron.

Computer scientists have been paying attention. In 2020, the Slime Mould Algorithm was published as a metaheuristic optimisation technique mimicking Physarum’s foraging behaviour, and it has since been applied to engineering design, machine learning, and combinatorial optimisation. At the University of the West of England, Andrew Adamatzky’s Unconventional Computing Laboratory has used slime mould as a literal computing substrate, constructing logic gates from its protoplasmic tubes.

But the deeper significance lies in a philosophy, not a single algorithm: decentralised intelligence. The idea that sophisticated problem-solving can emerge from vast numbers of simple, locally interacting agents—without any central controller—is one of the most powerful concepts in modern computer science. And it is a philosophy that Israel has been practising in its own technology ecosystem for decades.

The parallels are striking. Israel’s defence architecture is built on the principle that no single point of failure should bring down a system. Iron Dome operates as a distributed network: ten batteries, each with its own radar and battle management system, wirelessly networked and geographically dispersed across the country. The architecture ensures that the loss of any one node does not compromise the whole—precisely the principle Physarum employs when it builds a transport network that balances efficiency against redundancy.

Israel’s research institutions are already working at this frontier. At the Technion, Daniel Zelazo’s ERC-funded Swarm Systems Lab develops decentralised control algorithms for drone swarms that maintain formation and adapt to disruption using only local sensing—no centralised command. At Tel Aviv University, Matan Ben Zion and colleagues published work in Science Robotics (2023) on autonomous robots that learn cooperative behaviour through mechanical design alone, with no central controller or explicit coordination programming. And in a collaboration spanning TAU, the Weizmann Institute, and Bar Ilan University, Adi Shklarsh and Eshel Ben-Jacob modelled bacteria-inspired smart agents whose adaptive interactions outperform more sophisticated swarms in complex terrains (PLOS Computational Biology, 2011). The common thread is the same insight that Physarum discovered roughly a billion years ago: intelligence does not require a brain, and optimal networks do not require a planner.

The Start-Up Nation model itself is, at its core, a Physarum-like system. As someone who studies network optimisation and emerging markets at the intersection of financial economics and geopolitics, the parallel is hard to ignore: thousands of small firms, each probing the environment for opportunities, reinforcing pathways that yield returns, and allowing unpromising ventures to atrophy. It is not a centrally planned industrial strategy. The mathematics that slime mould performs biologically is the same mathematics that describes how venture capital flows through an innovation ecosystem, how logistics networks are routed, and how alliance structures form in international relations.

There is a geographical dimension too. Israel is small, topographically complex, and subject to security disruptions that periodically sever infrastructure. These are precisely the conditions under which Physarum-inspired network design excels. The organism’s genius is not in building networks for stable environments—it is in building networks that adapt when conditions change, that reroute when paths are blocked, that maintain connectivity under stress. Israeli transport planners, logistics companies, and military network designers would find genuine utility in these tools.

As AI moves into its next phase, the lessons of slime mould are likely to become more relevant, not less. The current generation of large language models are centralised, energy-intensive, and increasingly expensive to scale. The biological alternative—distributed, energy-efficient, and inherently resilient—points toward a complementary future: hybrid systems that combine the pattern recognition of neural networks with the decentralised optimisation strategies that nature perfected before neurons evolved.

Israel, with its world-class AI institutions, its culture of improvisation and adaptive problem-solving, and its hard-won understanding that resilience matters as much as efficiency, may be better positioned than most to lead this next wave. The irony would be delicious: a nation whose technological prowess is the envy of the world, taking its cue from an organism that has been solving complex problems without a brain for roughly a billion years.

© The Times of Israel (Blogs)