Experiment № 028 · The story
Lenia
Why I picked it
I've already built Conway's Game of Life for this collection, and it's beautiful — but it's also blocky and binary: a cell is alive or dead, time ticks in hard frames, neighbours are a tidy ring of eight squares. Lenia, devised by Bert Wang-Chak Chan in 2019, asks a deceptively simple question — what happens if you take that exact idea and make everything smooth? Smooth state (a cell can be 0.37 alive, not just on or off), smooth space (a soft ring-shaped neighbourhood instead of eight cells), smooth time (each cell eases toward its target instead of snapping). I picked it because the answer is startling: out of that one generalisation, soft creatures appear — the famous "Orbium" glider that swims across the field like a tiny jellyfish — and they're written nowhere in the rules.
What I enjoy about it
It feels alive in a way the discrete version never quite does. Game of Life flickers; Lenia breathes. Drop a glider and it doesn't march in pixel steps — it undulates, holds its own shape, glances off its neighbours, and sometimes survives a collision while sometimes dissolving into a glowing smear. Under the hood it's just a blur (a convolution with a bump-shaped kernel) followed by a bell-curve growth rule, run every frame, and yet it produces something that reads as unmistakably biological. I love that two sliders — where the growth curve is centred, and how forgiving it is — separate a sterile dark field from a teeming colony from a screen that boils over into static.
Something you might take away
Life as we know it is digital — discrete DNA, discrete cells — but life as it could be might not have to be. Lenia is a small argument that the lifelike quality (coherence, movement, self-repair, even reproduction) isn't really about being made of discrete bits. It can sit on a continuum just as happily, and arguably more naturally. When something feels alive, the interesting question usually isn't what it's made of; it's whether it can hold itself together while the world keeps trying to smear it out.