The Lab
Sandboxes for the eighteen instruments behind this project: an elementary cellular automaton explorer, a particle collider built from soliton-like ECA gliders, a cyclic tag system, a discrete-time quantum walk, the same walk run on a cylinder, a sphere, and a torus, Conway’s Game of Life, Langton’s self-reproducing loop, Lenia’s continuous-state rule family, Conway’s rule run on a microtubule lattice, SmoothLife’s continuous two-kernel generalization, a field projected onto the Riemann sphere, a neural cellular automaton running a learned, trained update rule, mass-conserving Flow Lenia, a particle swarm descending an energy field, a population selected for persistence, a trained update rule flattened onto one dimension, a toy Alfvén-wave engine launching counter-propagating plasma packets, and a falsification-battery demo that cuts a drive and scrambles phases. Play with each below.
Elementary cellular automata
All 256 elementary cellular automata — change the rule or starting condition and the URL updates as you go, so any configuration you find is shareable by copying the address bar.
Collider
Fire two particles from the ECA glider catalog at each other and watch what the collision produces.
Tag system
A cyclic tag system rewrites the front of a word using rules chosen in turn, tracing out a space-time diagram as it runs.
The word display caps at 4096 cells and halts with “overflow” beyond that.
- 011
- 10
- 101
Quantum walk
A discrete-time quantum walk whose coin angle sets an effective mass, rendered as an amplitude worldsheet over time.
mass θ = 22° — t = 0
Geometry
The same quantum walk run on a cylinder, projected onto a sphere two ways, and generalized to a genuinely two-dimensional walk on a torus.
Life
Conway’s Game of Life, seeded with random noise. Switch to the glider or Gosper-gun presets with the picker below the board.
Langton loop
A single self-reproducing loop on an 8-state cellular automaton. Let it run and watch one loop become a colony.
Lenia
The same grow-or-shrink logic as Life, run as a continuous-valued field on the lattice. Drag the μ and σ sliders while it plays.
Microtubule
Conway’s exact rule, B3/S23, run on a 13-wide grid wrapped into a 13_3 helical lattice — Hameroff and Watt’s 1982 microtubule geometry, a lattice-topology experiment, not a biology claim. The seam guide marks where crossing shifts a pattern three rows along the axis.
SmoothLife
Rafler’s continuous generalization of Life, sampled through an inner disk and a surrounding annulus instead of Life’s 8 Moore neighbors. Under this project’s relaxation timestep, a noise soup settles into a static, spatially structured labyrinth and stays there.
Sphere
The Lenia garden’s field, projected onto the Riemann sphere ℂP¹ through a stereographic projection — the same dynamics, drawn through a change of coordinates, the point at infinity always in view.
Neural CA
A learned update rule — the published Growing Neural Cellular Automata weights, run through this project’s own inference port. Press or drag on the grown lizard to wound it and watch the trained rule regrow it.
Flow Lenia
Lenia’s growth rule rewritten as a flow: every cell’s mass moves to a new position instead of being added in place, so nothing is created and nothing is destroyed. Watch the mass readout hold steady while the pattern keeps reorganizing.
Particle Lenia
No grid: about 200 particles at continuous positions, each descending the slope of an energy field built from its neighbors. Watch the energy readout fall as the swarm settles into clusters.
Evolution
A small tournament-selection loop over Lenia genomes, scored by persistence plus a novelty bonus against an archive of behavior already seen. Run a generation and watch the population and its archive change.
String neurons
A neural cellular automaton flattened onto a single dimension, its weights trained by this project’s own build script rather than ported from anyone else’s checkpoint. Click the line to wound it and watch the trained rule close the gap.
Alfvén waves
This project’s own toy physics engine: two counter-propagating Elsässer fields on a periodic line, each a pure spectral phase rotation. Launch a z⁺ and a z⁻ packet toward each other and watch them cross without disturbing one another.
Falsification battery
Cut the drive on a continuously forced candidate and its pattern collapses; cut it on a self-propagating packet and nothing changes. Scramble the phases and watch energy hold steady while coherence falls apart.