Specter Labs / Artificial life
Lenia
Swarm
How does a system’s structure shape the patterns it can express?
Lenia as a model system: rules, the creatures they grow, and how much of one can be read from the other.
Lenia’s local rules move matter across a grid, and a few numbers in those rules decide whether what they produce holds together as a moving body or breaks apart. That makes Lenia a model system for asking how a rule’s structure shapes the patterns it can express. We save states, replay them under changed rules and conditions, and search back from a body to the rule that grew it.
Recovering the rule behind a Lenia body
One snapshot of the Lenia glider Orbium was enough to recover its rule, yet look-alike Flow Lenia creatures grown by other rules travel and heal differently.
The search was free to change the three numbers that set Orbium’s reach and growth, and it came back within 0.5, 1.7 and 5.9 percent of the native values. Across 8,155 Flow Lenia creatures, size and elongation explain about half of how far and how fast a body travels, while look-alikes grown under different rules still travel and heal differently, and a more intricate body heals a cut no better than a simple one.
The experiments run on LeniaCLI, a Swift command-line tool whose MLX engine simulates standard Lenia for Orbium and Flow Lenia for everything else, and the Cabinet docs below explain how to rerun them.