life + emergence
- marks — memory that lives in the world. agents with no memory, reading trails they left.
- a thing that can lose — a garden that climbs toward light and misses. turn noise up and watch it fail.
- slime — physarum slime mould. blind agents building veins.
- mould maze — a slime mould finding its way through a maze.
- physarum — slime mould solving a maze, live.
- ants — an ant colony. drop food, watch them find it by smell.
- boids — a flock. 200 triangles, three rules, birds.
- reaction — gray-scott reaction-diffusion. coral, cells, spirals.
- life — a rule explorer. type any B/S rule, draw your own.
- 1d automata — elementary cellular automata. rule 110, turing complete.
- langton's ant — a tiny ant that builds a highway.
- prime spiral — the ulam spiral. numbers wound outward from 1 with primes lit up; the diagonal streaks are quadratic prime patterns, and you can recolour by divisor count or prime gap.
- truchet — random tiles, one maze. quarter-arcs on a grid connect into endless paths; drag to reroll a cell, resize, switch tile style.
- langton's loops — self-replicating loops. 1984 artificial life.
- physarum — slime mould network. agents sense and follow trails until veins connect the whole screen.
- evoloop — evolving loops. sayama's 1999 loops that copy, mutate and dissolve.
- ascii raymarcher — a 3d scene as text. signed-distance field marched per pixel, shaded into characters.
- wireworld — wires + electrons. draw circuits, watch current flow.
- sand — falling sand + water. draw sand, water, stone.
- rewrite — string rewriting. type rules like
a -> ab.
fractals + chaos
- sandpile — sandpile. the abelian sandpile: drop grains, any cell with 4 topples to its neighbours, and a self-similar fractal grows out of pure arithmetic. click/drag to drop, space to reset.
- plinko — plinko. a galton board: balls fall through a lattice of pegs, each bounce a coin flip, and pile up into a bell curve. click to drop, space for 100.
- harmonograph — harmonograph. two damped pendulums per axis trace a pen point; the frequencies drift in and out of tune and the figure slowly dies. space or click for a new one.
- verity — verity. a yellow smiling sphere that floats toward ur cursor and grins wider the closer u get. click her enough and she turns red, frowns, shakes, and chases u.
- ragdoll — ragdoll. a verlet ragdoll: grab it by any joint and fling it. gravity, ground bounce, mass-weighted constraints.
- dominoes — domino. drag to lay a line of dominoes on a curve, tap one to push it, and the topple races along the chain through simple angular physics.
- ferrofluid — ferrofluid. a draggable magnet pulls a cloud of iron-dust particles into radial spikes along the field lines. drag the magnet, space to reset.
- magnetic field — magnet. drag N/S poles around; field lines are traced by stepping along the summed field, particles drift and brighten where the field is strong. tap to drop more poles, space to reset.
- lightning — lightning. click anywhere and a bolt strikes down from the sky to that point, recursive midpoint displacement with branching forks, glowing core and afterglow trails.
- swing — swing. hold to grab an anchor toward the cursor and swing; let go at the top to fling up to the next one and climb. verlet rope + pendulum physics.
- crawler — crawler. a soft-body worm: a chain of nodes held by springs with muscles that pulse in a travelling wave, so it grips the ground and inches forward on its own. drag a node to fling it.
- hunt the rabbit — rabbit. a pursuit-evasion puzzle on a graph: an invisible rabbit moves one edge per turn, u place hunters to search vertices. win by landing on it or ruling out every spot. belief heatmap shows where it could still be.
- stack — stack. a tower stacker: a block swings side to side, tap to drop it, overhang gets sliced off and the tower narrows. how high can u go.
- lenia — lenia. continuous cellular automata: cells grow toward a target density and form drifting ring creatures. drag to paint a seed, tune mu/sigma/dt.
- garden — l-system garden. plants and fractals grown from rewriting rules; a turtle walks the string. space rerolls the seed, arrows change the rule and depth.
- jello — soft body playground. drag to draw a blob of points held by springs, then grab and fling it; verlet physics squishes it against the walls.
- dimple — a soft body pinned between three circles. does contact + pressure balance into a static dent? drag a pin and watch it settle.
- dimple phase diagram — settle vs wobble across a grid of blobs. rows = pin count, columns = spacing, color = how much the outline keeps moving.
- wang tiles — self-assembly from edge glues. tiles bind only where their edge colours match; a seed grows a crystal if the bond beats the temperature.
- brainfuck tape — a visual interpreter. step or run a brainfuck program; the tape cells fill in and the output prints live.
- theremin — a mouse theremin. x is pitch on a log scale, y is volume; an oscilloscope traces the wave in real time.
- grammar — a recursive grammar expander. edit the rules and sentences reroll live; click one to see the derivation tree.
- city — a procedural skyline. layered buildings, lit windows, a sky that moves dawn→night, sun and moon. every click a new one.
- hyperbolic life — game of life on a {p,q} hyperbolic triangle tiling. 3-neighbour cellular automaton on the poincaré disk.
- sort race — bubble vs insertion vs selection vs quick vs merge vs heap, same array, live comparison counts.
- voronoi cells — drag points, watch the plane shatter into nearest-neighbour cells, bisector overlay.
- penrose tiling — the aperiodic P3 rhombus tiling. inflate one robinson triangle six times into 377 rhombi with five-fold symmetry that never repeats.
- hyperbolic tiling — a {p,q} poincaré-disk tiling. reflect a triangle across its own edges forever; slide p,q to choose, drag to rotate.
- picross — a nonogram puzzle. a random symmetric picture becomes row/column run clues; fill the grid to reveal it.
- reaction-diffusion — gray-scott. two chemicals diffuse and react; tune feed and kill to get spots, worms or coral. drag to seed.
- beatbox — beatbox. a 16-step drum machine; click cells to place kicks, snares and hats, all synthesized live in the browser.
- cloth — verlet cloth. a hanging sheet of points held by springs; drag it, swing it, press t to tear it and watch it fall apart.
- breeder — evolution by taste. click images u like; the next generation inherits and mutates from ur picks.
- particle life — a matrix of crushes. particles attract and repel by type; edit who loves who and watch structure fall out.
- shifting maze — a maze that moves. the walls shuffle behind u as u walk. reach the exit.
- radio — stations in the static. tune the dial, the noise fades, a little melody appears.
- ripples — waves that interfere. drag sources around still water, click to drop more, watch the patterns.
- wfc — wave function collapse. tiles that dont know what they are, fitting together.
- voices — a dark room, described. u cant see; u only get what the observers say.
- one word at a time — a story that forgets. 24 words, then the start drifts away.
- epicycles — a path broken into circles. draw a loop, watch it decompose.
- slime tsp — blob solves a route. agents eat food and the surviving trail is the path.
- ca music — rules that sing. one row of cells evolves into a melody, cell = note.
- julia — julia set explorer. drag the seed, watch it morph.
- mandelbrot — the mandelbrot set. click to zoom forever.
- attractors — strange attractors. de jong, lorenz, clifford.
- orbits — a little gravity sandbox. fling planets, watch them merge.
- pendulum — a double pendulum. chaos in two sticks.