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EXP. 006 · Lenia

mass ≈ — · tap seeds · drag smears

The Lab — EXP. 006 · growth, literally

Nobody programmed the swimming.

One growth formula on a continuous field — Bert Chan's Lenia. This file carries a single still portrait of one creature; everything it does — glide, wobble, collide, heal, die — comes out of the formula. Tap to seed a new one, drag to smear raw matter, and the mass readout below is measured, not typeset.

EXP. 006 — Notes

Lenia

A continuous cellular automaton: every point of the field passes its neighborhood — weighted by a ring-shaped kernel — through one growth curve, sixty times a second, everywhere at once. Under that single rule, almost every configuration of matter dissolves. A precious few — the Orbium is the famous one — hold together, glide, and heal when damaged. The swimming is not in the code; it's a property of the shape. Seed a smudge and watch the difference between matter and an organism.

Product-market fit, as physics: the space of things you could ship is enormous, and the configurations that self-sustain are tiny islands in it. Fit isn't an amount of features; it's an arrangement — retention that funds acquisition that feeds retention — and arrangements either hold together under the rule of the market or they don't.

Field test: remove the push — the spend, the founder heroics — and watch. A smudge dissolves quietly. An organism keeps swimming, and heals after a hit: a bad week, a copycat, a platform change. Iterate toward the shape that survives subtraction.

Nobody programmed the swimming. One rule, applied without mercy or favorites, and out of it: creatures. Watch one take a wound and close it. The universe plays no favorites either; it only keeps what keeps itself.

  1. Mechanism under test: single-channel Lenia (Bert Chan, 2018) — a continuous cellular automaton. One world A ∈ [0,1] on a half-float ping-pong; each tick measures every point's neighborhood through a ring kernel K (a gaussian shell over normalized radius, R = 13 cells), feeds that potential U through one growth curve G(U) = 2·exp(−(U−μ)²/2σ²) − 1 with μ = 0.15, σ = 0.015, and updates A′ = clamp(A + 0.1·G). That sentence is the entire physics of everything alive on this page. σ matters more than it looks: at 0.017 a collision can ignite runaway growth that floods the whole dish; at Orbium's catalogued 0.015 collisions resolve the hard way — one survives, or neither.
  2. Kernel honesty: the true convolution at R = 13 is a 27×27 box — 729 taps per pixel. Here it is a quadrature: 156 seeded sample points on 8 concentric rings (per-point weight ∝ K(r)·r, seeded angular offsets, bilinear taps smoothing the gaps). Verified offline against the exact kernel: Orbium holds the same mass (~75) and glides under both.
  3. Seed honesty: gaussian smudges were tried first and are outside the glider basin at these parameters — every one either starved to zero or exploded into a dish-filling culture. So the stamp is the real thing: Orbium unicaudatus's 20×20 cells, embedded above, pressed in at a seeded angle. A body at rest is stored; its behavior is not.
  4. The mind-bend: emergence. The stored array is a still photograph — yet stamped into the field it swims, holds its shape against the noise of a smear, recovers or dissolves when two meet. The locomotion is written nowhere; it lives in the growth curve's response to the body's own shadow through the kernel. And extinction is a real ending — when the readback finds the dish static or empty, the loop truly stops.
  5. Lineage: Conway's Game of Life (1970 — binary states, 8 neighbors, gliders) → SmoothLife (Rafler, 2011 — continuous space) → Lenia (Chan, 2018 — continuous states, space and time; hundreds of catalogued species). This dish is the smallest honest slice of it: one channel, one kernel, one rule.
  6. What might graduate: the luminous-matter render (density → bone-to-ember, contour at A = 0.5) as a living figure ground; the mass readout as an honest instrument in the B-edition sense; the settled-check pattern — ambient motion that measures itself and stops when the phenomenon is over.

PHYSICS — raw WebGL2 + EXT_color_buffer_float, no libraries, single file · mulberry32-seeded dish and kernel · ambient loop only while on-screen and tab visible (zero frames otherwise) · settled check every 120 frames via a 64×64 readback — a still or empty dish stops the loop for real · mass readout computed from that readback, never typeset · reduced motion = a still of the grown dish · no-float-GL = designed fallback · zero console errors.

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