Exogenous-Endogenous Surfactant Interaction Yields Heterogeneous Spreading in Complex Branching Networks.

Experiments have shown that surfactant introduced to a liquid-filled maze can find the solution path. We reveal how the maze-solving dynamics arise from interactions between the added surfactant and endogenous surfactant present at the liquid surface. We simulate the dynamics using a nonlinear model solved with a discrete mimetic scheme on a graph.