Slimulator is a program you can use to simulate slime mold pathfinding and enviroment exploration. The input is an image of the environment and the output is a video of the simulated slime mold behavior.

Input file

Input file is any standard image format supported by the FFMPEG library. The recommended format is PNG.

Legend

• Yellow (FFFF00) - Slime mould
• Black (FFFFFF) - Impenetrable wall
• Red (FF0000) - Food
• Every other color - Free space

Example input:

Output

The output of the example input above with default settings:

Simulation parameters

Technical parameters

Parameter	Type	Default	description
totalCountOfSimulationTicks	(int)	70000	Amount "ticks" (iterations of simulations)
ticksPerFrame	(int)	20	Amount of ticks per one video frame. This parameter is used to control the speed of simulation. The higher the number of ticks per frame, the higher the speed. Be aware that setting this parameter too high can result in loss of information about the progress.
frameRate	(int)	60	Frames per second in the output video. This parameter can be used to control the speed of simulation too but it is not recommended because it can damage output video quality.
seed	(string)	"HlenkaHelenka"	Seed for the random number gerenerator.
threadCount	(int)	1	This program can be parallelized. This parameter sets the amount of threads used.

Slime mould behavoir parameters

Parameter	Type	Default	description
slimeAffinityRadius	(int)	4	The euclidean distance in which points affect nearby slime mold cells.
slimeOccurenceAffinityMultiplier	(int)	1	Multiplier of weight of affinity of immediate advantage of point based on its surroundings.
slimeTimeAffinityMultiplier	(int)	10	Multiplier of weight of time on slime mold behavior (prioritizing unexplored and not recently visited places).

Usage

Wizard

This project contains a basic wizard that will guide you. All you need is to run:

dotnet run Launcher.cs

As framework

Here is a minimal example usage of Slimulator as framework:

static void Main(string[] args) {
    Simulation sim = new Simulation(@"path/to/input/file.png",
                                    @"path/of/output/file.mp4",
                                    SimulationSettings.QuickTest());
    Console.WriteLine(sim.Start());
    sim.End(true);
}

In SimulationSetting class are following premade setups:

• Default - uses default values
• SlowMotion - very slow but detailed output
• Fast - very fast video ideal for large mazes
• QuickTest - short video ideal for parameter tweaking
• Benchmark - outputs 30 frame video with 1000 ticks per frame

You can still create your own setting by making yout own instance of SimulationSetting class:

SimulationSettings customSettings = new SimulationSettings(
    totalCountOfSimulationTicks: 70000,
    ticksPerFrame: 20,
    frameRate: 60,
    seed: "HlenkaHelenka",
    threadCount: 1,
    slimeAffinityRadius: 4,
    slimeOccurenceAffinityMultiplier: 1,
    slimeTimeAffinityMultiplier: 10);

I highly encourage you to experiment with your settings. If you discover something interesting, feel free to contact me. I can assist you or add your discovery to this repository.

Bugs and feature requests

If you discover any bugs or unwanted behavior, feel free to open an issue. I am open to your feature requests too, so do not be afraid to contact me or open an issue.

Contributions

All pull requests are welcome. Just follow current codestyle.

Author

This software was made by Jan Černý for MatSliz Research facility. If you have any questions about the project and slime mold research visit MatSliz official page on Slime and mould collective or contact me on my email address.

License

This program is published under GPL 3