Four Species

Each one follows different rules. None of them do what you expect.

Slime mold

Physarum

A real organism. Single-celled. Brainless. Famous for solving mazes in petri dishes. Inside Cell Zoo, thousands of agents wander, sniff their own trails, and turn toward what they recognize. The trails stack into structures that look like neural networks, river deltas, or alien cities — depending on how you tune the sensors. Flat or volumetric. The 3D version, you can walk through.

Continuous life

Lenia

A continuous form of life. Most cellular automata are binary — cells flip between alive and dead, on and off. Lenia flows. Smooth math, soft edges, slow transitions. The result: organisms that swim, split, eat, breathe. They look biological because the underlying math behaves biologically. None of them were designed. They were discovered.

Reaction-diffusion

Gray-Scott

Two chemicals chasing each other across a grid. One feeds the other, the other consumes the first, both spread outward. From this minimal recipe come the patterns on a leopard, the spots on a cuttlefish, the labyrinths in a fingerprint, the growth rings of coral. Tune the rates and watch the same recipe produce wildly different worlds.

Emergent ecosystems

Particle Life

Each color of particle has its own opinion about every other color. Red likes blue. Blue ignores red but chases yellow. Yellow flees green. Green orbits red. From these private rules, cells form, orbits stabilize, ecosystems emerge. Rewrite the rules and watch one universe become another.