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blossim

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Fresh in my mind from building a simple raytracer, I wanted to keep experimenting with graphics programming using wgpu. On my list of ideas was a simulation of slime mold. Essentially, you simulate millions of tiny particles that move around according to some simple rules and render the results.

My simulation is implemented as a compute shader that runs on the GPU. A simple render pass then takes the results of the simulation and renders them to the screen. There’s only a few rules that govern the movement of the particles:

• Diffusion - Particles emit a pheromone that diffuses through the environment.
• Attraction - Particles are attracted to pheromones, and move towards them.
• Repulsion - Particles are repelled by other particles, preventing them from clumping together.
• Randomness - Particles move randomly, but with a bias towards pheromones.

Using these rules, the particles will form a network of connections that resembles slime mold. The simulation is quite fast, and can handle millions of particles without any issues.

As always, there is a lot more that can be done to improve the simulation. For example:

• More complex pheromone interactions - We could add more complex interactions between pheromones, such as decay or different types of pheromones.
• Different particle types - We could add different types of particles that interact with the pheromones in different ways.
• Visual effects - We could add visual effects to the particles, such as trails or glowing particles.
• User interaction - We could add user interaction to the simulation, such as allowing the user to place pheromones or particles in the environment.

I also had ideas for programming the simulation somehow, by compiling a lisp DSL into the compute shader. I hope to explore this idea in the future.