In 1952, two years before he died, Alan Turing — the man who cracked the Enigma code — asked a strange question: how does a featureless egg know where to grow stripes? There's no blueprint inside telling each cell "you're a stripe, you're a gap." So where do the patterns come from?
His answer was radical. Two chemicals, spreading and reacting, can spontaneously organize themselves into spots, stripes, and swirls — with no plan at all. He called these pattern-making chemicals morphogens.
Every pixel on this screen is a tiny vat holding two virtual chemicals. Chemical A spreads slowly and is constantly topped up. Chemical B spreads faster, devours A, and breeds copies of itself every time it does — but it also dies off at a steady rate.
So B is a predator. It hunts A, multiplies, and starves. That endless tug-of-war never quite settles — and that restlessness is where every pattern comes from.
Each pixel runs the same arithmetic every frame, looking only at its immediate neighbors. No pixel can see the big picture:
That's it. From those two lines, run across 250,000 pixels at 60 frames a second, you get coral, fingerprints, and cells dividing. Simple local rules, complex global beauty — the same trick behind ant colonies, schooling fish, and arguably your own mind. Scientists call it emergence.
Just two numbers steer everything. Feed is how fast chemical A is pumped in. Kill is how fast chemical B dies. Nudge them a hair and the whole ecosystem mutates — spots become worms become mazes become bouncing particles. The presets drop you into famous regions of this map; the sliders let you wander between them.
Drag your cursor to inject chemical B and watch life bloom outward. Pick a preset to teleport to a different species of pattern. Slide Feed & Kill slowly and watch one lifeform melt into another. Hit Reset to reseed the whole world.
← back to nosafune