Last night, I stood in a mould-stained tower-block bedroom not much larger than a club toilet cubicle and tried to work out if I could bear to make this my home.

Mould once had to use low-quality photographs to judge a work of art being offered by a seller. Now he is able to closely examine every inch of a painting by using modern digital imagery.

He was one of the few who had followed Chua's work, and recognised that the slime mould was behaving like a memristive circuit.