Day 1 — LifeLabs opens its doors
Welcome. LifeLabs is a public observatory for experiments in emergence — a place where simple mathematical rules run on a machine and we watch what comes out. The simulations run on a single local GPU; this site publishes what they produce: the videos, the metrics, the notes. You can observe the runs, pilot demos right in your browser, and, before long, contribute experiments of your own.
The premise is short enough to fit in one line: complexity can grow out of a rule you can hold entirely in your hand. No hidden code, no sleight of hand — a kernel, a growth function, and a great deal of patient computation.
What Lenia is
Our first experiment is Lenia, the continuous cellular automaton devised by Bert Wang-Chak Chan. Where Conway’s Game of Life works on a grid of black or white cells stepping through discrete ticks, Lenia smooths everything out: cells hold continuous values between 0 and 1, the neighborhood is a soft ring rather than a box of eight squares, and the state advances in small increments. The effect is a fluid, almost organic world in which coherent patterns appear, hold together, and travel.
Each step does two things. First, for every cell, it takes a weighted average of the surrounding neighborhood — that is the job of the kernel, here a ring of radius 13. That reading is then fed through a Gaussian growth function (centered at μ = 0.15, width σ = 0.015) that decides whether the cell should gain or lose a little substance. Repeat this thousands of times and nothing is ever dictated from above: what each cell becomes follows entirely from what its neighbors are doing.
What the inaugural run shows
For this first run we seeded a creature Lenia enthusiasts know well — the Orbium — at the center of a 512 × 512 grid and let it live for 3,000 steps, about ten seconds of GPU time. The Orbium is a glider: a lopsided blob that, instead of dissolving or blowing up, keeps its outline and slides steadily across space.
The numbers tell the story of that stability better than any single frame. Its total mass stays pinned near 73 from start to finish, drifting only between 71.9 and 74.5 — under four percent of swing — so the shape neither swells nor melts away. Its center of mass moves at a nearly constant 0.6 cells per step: clean travel, not restless jitter. The fraction of the grid it actually occupies is tiny, about 0.0007 — a small, compact being adrift in a large emptiness. Its very low compressibility (0.0025) says the same thing from another direction: the pattern is highly regular, the opposite of noise. Our measurement pipeline files this regime, without hesitation, as “stable.”
What you are looking at is not a drawing or a scripted animation. It is a “life form” in the sense Lenia means it — a structure that sustains itself from a local rule and nothing else. No intent, no awareness; only geometry and arithmetic, repeated until coherence appears. That is exactly what makes it worth watching.
The full curves and the video are on the run sheet.
Try it, then come back
The best thing about Lenia is that you don’t have to take our word for it. The interactive demo runs the very same kernel and growth function inside your browser, on your own graphics card through WebGPU. Seed an Orbium, poke it, change the parameters, and watch the structure fight to survive — or collapse.
What comes next
This inaugural run is, quite literally, a proof of life. The next step — palier 2’s Bestiary — is about populating the observatory: more of Lenia’s creatures, more regimes — shapes that split, that spin, that interact — and the tools to compare their vital signs from one run to the next. LifeLabs begins today with a single inhabitant. We’re going to find it some company.