The Game of Life went continuous and started growing creatures

Conway's Game of Life is cells on a grid, each one alive or dead, ticking in hard steps. Take that same idea and make everything smooth, the space, the time, the states, and the blocky gliders turn into something that looks disturbingly like it is swimming.

Lenia, by Bert Wang-Chak Chan, is that smoothed-out Game of Life, and the things it grows behave like animals. They hold a shape, they move under their own power, they repair themselves when you damage them, and some are radially symmetric like jellyfish. Chan started the experiments in 2015 as a coding exercise, and the first creature to swim out of them, a glider now catalogued as Orbium, opened a zoo that has passed four hundred species across eighteen families, each one filed under a Latin binomial name like a proper specimen.

The whole engine is a blur and a bump

Here is the rule that brings them to life, and it is a small one. The grid holds smooth values instead of on and off. Each step, you blur the field with a fixed ring-shaped kernel to measure each cell's neighborhood, then push the result through a gentle growth function, a bump that says "this much neighbor means grow, that much means shrink," and nudge the field by a tiny amount. That is the whole engine. Because nothing is forced to a hard zero or one, patterns can hold together and glide instead of flickering.

Computationally, each step is one big convolution across the whole field, a texture rewritten in place over and over, the same shape of work as the GPU fluid solver sighted here before.

That is why the reference implementations span a speed ladder: the original JavaScript version, slowest and friendliest, a Matlab port built for statistics, and a Python version that runs on the GPU and carries the multi-kernel, multi-channel extensions where the strangest creatures live. The same rule pushed into three and four dimensions grows creatures there too, and the repo holds those builds as well.

The receipts stack up. The paper documenting it, published in the journal Complex Systems in 2019, took the International Society for Artificial Life's award for the year's outstanding publication, after the creatures had already won the virtual-creature contest at GECCO 2018 in Kyoto.

The unsettling bit is watching two of them collide and fuse, or one shed a piece that grows into another. Nobody wrote those behaviors. They fall out of the arithmetic, which is the entire point.

Go grow one

The original simulator runs in the browser with every knob exposed: kernel radius, growth center, time step, and a shelf of preset creatures to load. Drop an Orbium in, carve a piece off it, and watch it close the wound.

More complex behavior falling out of a simple rule: a paperclip factory that turns into a lecture on runaway goals.