Primer

Purpose

This primer gives the minimum conceptual frame needed to read lenia-swarm docs without jumping into implementation details.

What This Dossier Is

lenia-swarm is a Flow Lenia experiment system for discovering and indexing persistent patterns across parameter space.

The system has three coupled concerns:

• physics: how states evolve each step,
• morphology: how we summarize form and behavior,
• ecology: how populations and niches are compared across runs.

Core Objects

• state field A: the simulated multi-channel lattice state.
• genotype: parameter payload controlling kernels and global parameters.
• phenotype: observed behavior summarized into metrics.
• creature record: an indexed row tying genotype, phenotype, and provenance.

Invariant View

The research loop is:

1. run deterministic simulations from explicit configs,
2. extract metrics and derived morphometrics,
3. index into a versioned compendium,
4. analyze structure (taxonomy/ecology) offline.

Where to Go Next

• For model mechanics: Physics.md.
• For descriptive language: Morphology.md and Glossary.md.
• For grouping concepts: Taxonomy.md and Ecology.md.
• For executable details: move to ../contracts/.