Particle Life

nine kinds of dot, one rule each, no blueprint anywhere

canvas + web worker

Start here

Every dot follows one dumb instruction: for each colour, move a little toward it or away from it. That is the whole program. There is no plan, no goal, and nothing that knows what a "cell" is.

Yet within seconds you get membranes, chasing packs, orbiting pairs and things that look alive. That is emergence — complicated behaviour falling out of simple rules.

Every visit starts somewhere new — the 81 forces are rolled fresh each time you open this page, so what you are watching now has never existed before. Most rolls make mush. A few make something that crawls. Hit Randomize until one does.

Live

Do something

Drag the canvas to slide the whole world around. It wraps at every edge, so nothing ever falls off.

Physics

Particles per colour 160 Reach — how far a dot can feel 160 Personal space — ignore closer than 0 Dot size 3 Dot opacity 0.8 Trails 0.50

Trails at 1 wipes the screen every frame (crisp dots). Lower values leave motion smeared behind — that is where the silky look comes from.

Random force range

Weakest -1.0 Strongest 0.8

The window Randomize draws from. Skew it negative and everything clumps; skew it positive and everything scatters.

Every term on this page

Keys

R randomize T scatter
C clear trails F fullscreen
Space pause H hide the panels

Nine colours, wrapping world

The rules — who chases whom

Row acts on column. Green means the row colour is pulled toward the column colour; red means pushed away. Darker is stronger.

Hover a square to see both directions.

Left-click a square to pull harder · right-click to push harder · middle-click to zero it. Or just scroll on a square. Hold Shift for big steps.

Presets worth trying

Each preset lays down its pattern, then rerolls a quarter of the 81 squares at random — so the shape is recognisable but no two clicks give the same world. Click the same one again to reroll it. Random values come from the range set on the left. Spinners is the exception: it is a saved grid and comes back identical every time.

Why this is worth staring at

Nothing here is choreographed. The force matrix is 81 numbers, and every visible structure — the cell walls, the hunting packs, the little rotating engines — is a side effect of those numbers plus a world that wraps.

It is the same argument biology makes: you do not need a designer to get structure, only a rule and a lot of repetitions.

Built for a bigger screen. This dashboard is dense — try landscape, or open it on a laptop.