The Atlas — mapping the space of Lenia

Until now, LifeLabs ran simulations one at a time: one Orbium, one setting, one replay. But Lenia isn’t a creature — it’s an infinite family of creatures, governed by two numbers. μ (mu) sets the centre of the growth function, σ (sigma) its width: together they decide whether a pattern lives, dies or overflows. The natural question isn’t “what does THIS setting do?” but “what does the whole space of settings look like?”.

The Atlas answers by mapping it. Instead of piling up simulations, it arranges them: every pixel of the map is a real short simulation, and the whole map is Lenia’s (μ, σ) plane seen at a single glance.

What this Atlas is

A grid of 128 × 128 = 16,384 real simulations. Each cell is a small 64×64 world, seeded with the same Orbium at its centre, then left to evolve for 200 steps with its own (μ, σ) pair. The 16,384 worlds run in parallel on the GPU — a single tensor, a single sweep — in about twenty seconds on an RTX 5070. Nothing is faked or interpolated: what you hover is the final state of a real evolution, with its thumbnail and measured mass.

The swept bounds are μ ∈ [0.10, 0.35] and σ ∈ [0.005, 0.20]. At the end, each cell is classified by the same vital signs as the rest of the site: extinct (mass collapses to zero), stable (the pattern holds), exploded (the grid fills up) or evolving (mass is still changing at the end, without dying or overflowing).

What the map shows

The real distribution of this inaugural sweep:

• stable — 10,548 cells (64%): the great continent of life. Around the Orbium regime and well beyond, the pattern persists.
• extinct — 4,505 cells (28%): the ocean of death. σ too small or μ badly placed, and the creature dies within a few steps.
• exploded — 1,328 cells (8%): the overflow zone, appearing toward large σ (growth too wide) — the reason we pushed σ up to 0.20: below 0.10 this regime simply doesn’t exist.
• evolving — 3 cells (0.02%): and this is the map’s most honest result. Under deterministic Orbium seeding, Lenia produces almost no “still evolving” regime: the border between life and death is a razor’s edge, not a band. We don’t manufacture this category to look good — the map is genuinely made of three great continents (death, life, explosion) separated by an almost invisible frontier.

Known anchor point: the cell of the historical Orbium (μ=0.15, σ=0.015), ringed in gold on the map, lands squarely in the stable zone. It’s the landmark proving the map is oriented correctly — its creature is exactly where it should be.

Explore it yourself

The map is interactive and 100% client-side: hover a cell to see its thumbnail, its (μ, σ) and its category; click it and the Lenia demo replays that exact setting in your browser. That’s the point of the Atlas: not to watch thousands of simulations scroll by, but to pick a point on the map and see the creature that lives there come to life.

Open the Lenia Atlas, or the full run page for the exact parameters. Everything is reproducible from seed 42.