The program is a Java™ applet, which provides you with a full
three-dimensional simulation of mycelial growth.
It will appear below providing you have a Java™ enabled browser.
If the grey box acquires scroll bars, check-boxes and similar paraphernalia, then you have the program and you're ready to go. In the approximate middle of the grey "data space" there's a little red spot. That's the fungal spore. Use your mouse to click on the "START" button at top left - and watch that fungus grow! You can pause at any time (click in the "Pause" check-box at top left), and then resume by clicking again on the "Pause" check-box to remove the check mark. Any time you click on the "START NEW" button you will start the whole thing over again from the "spore germination" stage. You can rotate the visualisation in the horizontal axis using the slider labelled "Turn Z", and/or around the vertical axis with the slider labelled "Turn X" (sneaky labelling, eh?); and/or resize your view with "Scale".
If none of these playthings appear and all you see is a featureless grey box, then you don't have a Java™ enabled browser! So you will have to follow the instructions on the previous page to download and install the Java™ Runtime Environment.
Most of the operation of the program is intuitive but we have some brief operating instructions you can download as a PDF file (and then save or print as you wish - but you need Adobe Acrobat Reader to do that: you can get that as a free download from this hyperlink).
If you don't want to download the PDF, you can see these instructions through this hyperlink.
Remember, although this program provides a lot of innocent fun to self-confessed fungus freaks like me, it IS a research tool. You can change the characteristics of the hyphal tips and experiment with the model. Liam McNulty has done a few initial experiments, which you can see through this hyperlink.
You might also like to read our more formal publications about this model which are accessible through this hyperlink.
Remember also that the applet is using YOUR computing power. Calculating the behaviour of a couple of thousand hyphal tips is pretty demanding, so if your computer is a bit on the slow side the normally smooth growth process will become hesitant and proceed in steps, and may appear to halt altogether. Please don't blame us because your computer isn't up to it!
One last thing: if you want to get rid of all this chat and concentrate on the lovely cyberfungi, just click on the button labelled "New window" to restart the applet in an entirely new window, which you can then resize to full-screen if you want to.