I'm still somewhat interested in consensus-building, but I kind of wonder if it should even be all that complex in a lot of cases. Certainly this is a big topic to bite into, and if I were to explore it I would need to find a way to focus a little.

At this point I'm so taken with the concept of bonds that I'm actually leaning toward wanting to just do an implementation of that. I've got some ideas for how to use them for semi-permeable membranes, too.

As a less big-monster-central-questiong-of-the-entire-paradigm project than “consensus,” I have an idea for combining the wavefront/burn idea with the ant/nest concept with something like pheromones but which builds a sparse grid of copies of itself. Make the grid self-repairing, and use propagating/burning signals to map the gradient both back to the nest and to ants that have located things they are looking for. See if a solid resource-gathering behavior can be built that way, even inside a maze or around obstacles.

Another more practical-applications sort of idea I have in my head is trying to think up a way of getting data in and out of an MFM in a robust fashion. This one probably also falls in the “too big” category though, unless I have a more specific idea before next week.