Particle Life
Particle Life is artificial life stripped to the bone. Every particle belongs to one of a few species, and a single table says how strongly each species is attracted to or repelled by every other. There is no code for cells, membranes, worms or predators — yet they appear, because the table is asymmetric: when red chases blue while blue flees red, energy keeps flowing and the world never settles. This version runs tens of thousands of particles on your graphics card with WebGPU compute shaders (with a CPU fallback), sorting them into a spatial hash every frame so each only feels its neighbours. Edit the rule table cell by cell, mutate it, drag through the world to stir it, zoom in on a creature, record a 10-second clip, and share any world you like as a link.
Runs 100% in your browser — simulations are computed locally on your device.
Notes
- Each pair feels a short-range push (so particles never overlap) and, at mid range, the attraction or repulsion from the table, falling to zero at the interaction radius. Friction then drains a fixed fraction of speed every step.
- The asymmetry is the magic: Newton’s third law is deliberately broken, so momentum is not conserved and clusters can propel themselves. Tick "Symmetric rules" and the same world freezes into static blobs.
- The model was popularized by Jeffrey Ventrella’s "Clusters" and Tom Mohr’s Particle Life; similar emergent behaviour appears in real active matter, from bacterial swarms to chemically driven colloids.
- The whole world wraps around at its edges, like the screen of an old arcade game, so no particle ever hits a wall.
- Runs 100% in your browser — simulations are computed locally on your device.
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