Lenia

Lenia (Bert Wang-Chak Chan, 2018) is Conway's Game of Life made continuous. There are no particles here and no cells that are simply alive or dead — only a smooth field of matter between 0 and 1, and one rule applied everywhere, forever:

Each point looks at its neighbourhood through a ring-shaped kernel — a soft doughnut of attention with radius R.
The density it sees goes through a bell curve: close to the ideal density μ means growth, too crowded or too lonely means decay. The width σ is how picky life is.
The field rises and falls by that verdict, a little each tick.

That is the whole universe. Everything you see — gliding organisms, breathing rings, dividing blobs, coral reefs — is a standing wave that discovered how to keep itself alive under one bell curve.

The knobs

radius is the size of the ring (and so of the creatures); rings stacks up to three concentric shells with different weights, which changes the anatomy of what can exist; growth and width are μ and σ, the centre and tolerance of the bell curve — the true genome of this world; speed is the time step. If everything dies out or freezes solid, the dish quietly reseeds itself with fresh noise.

Make it yours

Every rule is generated from a 32-bit seed, biased toward the fertile region of parameter space: copy it to save a universe or paste a friend's, then Load. Mutate nudges the rule; Evolve keeps nudging it so the law of life itself drifts. Draw matter with the pointer (or flip to erase) — it's a petri dish.

Sound

Toggle Audio (key a) and the dish conducts a generative ambient piece: a breathing drone and a pentatonic melody whose tempo follows the field's growth activity. All synthesised live with the Web Audio API.

Keyboard

space pause · r randomize · m mutate · e evolve · p palette · a sound · n reseed · h hide panel · i this panel

A single self-contained HTML file · no libraries, no network, no assets. WebGL2: the convolution runs in a fragment shader over a polar-sampled kernel, rendered with HDR bloom. Lenia was discovered by Bert Wang-Chak Chan. Built with Claude.