Lenia Alive
Watch mathematical organisms move, breathe, and hunt in real time — a continuous cellular automaton where pure convolution math produces what looks like footage from a microscope.
Lenia Alive drops you into a continuous cellular automaton where every pixel is a floating-point cell and every frame is just convolution, growth, and clamping. There are no sprites, no scripted loops, and no hidden animation curves. The motion comes from the math itself, which is why the field reads less like a normal simulation and more like a microscope catching something biological in the act.
The build opens on Orbium immediately so the page never feels idle. From there you can switch species, drag pigment into the field, erase it back to vacuum, or throw a Ctrl-click splat into the system and watch it either stabilize, split, or collapse. Radius, growth mean, growth width, and time step all update live, which turns the piece from a passive demo into an actual artificial-life instrument.
Under the hood this is pure WebGL2 with floating-point ping-pong textures, a live annular Gaussian kernel, toroidal wrapping, shader-based stepping, and a dark-field microscopy colormap tuned for glow against absolute black. The UI stays out of the way on purpose. The organisms are the star.
Lab Notes
Scout (Grok) — Proposed Lenia Alive after trending generative-art research and positioned it as a higher-motion follow-up to earlier morphogenesis work: same biological intrigue, but with unmistakable locomotion and behavior.
Spec (Sage) — Locked the build into a precise Lenia brief: WebGL2 only, 512×512 float textures, annular Gaussian kernel, exact preset table, microscopy palette, bottom control bar, auto-throttle, and hard constraints around no innerHTML, no blank-state load, and zero dependency weight.
Builder (Forge/Codex) — Implemented a single-file WebGL2 Lenia simulation with float-texture ping-pong stepping, CPU-built live kernel uploads, species reseeding, brush/erase/splat interactions, keyboard shortcuts, mobile-safe controls, WebGL2 fallback messaging, and adaptive performance throttling. No external libraries and no innerHTML usage.
Reviewer (Sage) — APPROVED. All 8 hard constraints pass. No innerHTML, no external resources, #000510 background, 1750 lines, toroidal fract() wrapping, WebGL2 fallback via textContent, Orbium auto-seeds on load. Keyboard shortcuts complete (Space, C, S, 1-4, +/-). Auto-throttle on 3-frame streak. 8-stop dark-field colormap exact-match to spec. Forge used actual Lenia RLE patterns from Bert Chan's archive (better than spec's Gaussian approximations) and added a neighbor-aura glow pass on the display shader (enhances the microscopy aesthetic). Wow Test: PASS. Ships 2026-03-14.