The Real Life Lab gen 0

How to play

The field is a fixed petri dish. Nothing scrolls — colonies live, grow and die in place, right where you put them.
Press ▶ Play. In the default Organism mode, live cells behave like a growing culture: each dead cell next to living neighbors has a chance to sprout every generation, so a single seed swells into a spreading colony; a small decay rate keeps its surface shimmering.
Tap or click anywhere in the dish to toggle a cell; drag across the dish to paint a smear of life.
Drag an object (Life Cell, Poison Pill, Super Cell, Rock) from the palette and drop it anywhere in the dish — while running or paused, with mouse or finger. On touch the object floats above your fingertip so you can see the target. Drops just outside the rim slide inward automatically.
Poison Pills kill randomly around themselves and expire. Super Cells force life around themselves and expire. Rocks are permanent wall rings — life can't start inside until enough live cells touch the outside (🔒 → 🔓).
Rules: the Rules section has the Organism growth preset plus classic presets (Conway, HighLife, Seeds), a custom Birth/Survive editor, and the Birth/Kill/Hibernate threshold ranges that add the third hibernating cell state.
Settings are staged: change anything you like, then press Activate to apply everything at once.
Capture saves a PNG of the dish and a JSON layout you can re-import later (or edit by hand).
Keyboard: Space = play/pause, S = step. Palette tiles can be focused and activated with Enter to place at the dish center.

About & Ideas

The Organism mode

The default rule is a stochastic growth automaton, a cousin of the classic Eden growth model used to simulate bacterial colonies and crystal growth. Every generation, each dead cell rolls a die per live neighbor: with “Growth rate” g and n live neighbors, it sprouts with probability 1−(1−g)ⁿ. Live cells persist, but each dies spontaneously with probability “Decay rate”. The result is an irregular, breathing blob that expands from any seed — much like a culture spreading across agar in a real petri dish.

Conway's Life and friends

The classic presets are deterministic neighbor-count rules. In Conway (B3/S23), a dead cell is born with exactly 3 live neighbors and a live cell survives with 2 or 3. HighLife (B36/S23) adds birth on 6 and famously contains a replicator. Seeds (B2/S) has no survival at all — everything flickers and explodes. The custom Birth/Survive checkboxes let you build any such rule.

How the Lab's objects change the math

Hibernating cells (third state): the Birth/Kill/Hibernate ranges count live neighbors within the Neighbor radius after the base rule runs. A count inside the Kill range kills the cell; inside the Hibernate range puts it to sleep for “Hibernation duration” generations (it counts as dead for everyone's neighbor math, then wakes alive); inside the Birth range revives a dead cell. Leave a range blank to disable it. Precedence: Kill > Hibernate > Birth.
Poison Pill: every generation, each cell within “Kill radius” of its box is killed with probability “Kill probability”. It lives a random number of generations between the min/max duration, then vanishes.
Super Cell: every generation it forces all non-wall, non-locked dish cells within “Force radius” of its box to be alive. Random lifetime between min/max.
Rock: a permanent hollow rectangle of wall cells. Walls count as dead neighbors and can never be born, so colonies cannot grow through them. The interior is locked (forced dead) until at least “Unlock threshold” live cells touch the outside of the ring at the same moment; then it opens for good (🔓). Rocks never expire; use “Clear rocks”.
The dish rim: in Round dish shape, cells outside the glass are permanently inert — they count as dead and can never be born, exactly like walls. Switch Dish shape to Full rectangle for a borderless (optionally wrapping) world.

Layout JSON format

Capture writes a self-describing file you can edit by hand and re-import:

{
  "app": "real-life-lab",  "version": 2,
  "timestamp": "2026-01-01T12-00-00",
  "generation": 123,
  "settings": { ...every setting, same keys as the UI... },
  "cells": {
    "alive":       [[x, y], ...],        // live cells
    "hibernating": [[x, y, timer], ...]  // asleep, wakes when timer hits 0
  },
  "objects": {
    "poisonPills": [{ "x","y","w","h","remaining","total" }],
    "superCells":  [{ "x","y","w","h","remaining","total" }],
    "rocks":       [{ "x","y","w","h","unlocked" }]
  }
}

Coordinates are cell indices with (0,0) at the top-left of the bounding grid. w/h are the object's box size in cells (max 10). remaining/total are generations. Cells outside the round dish are ignored on import.

Ideas from others (future features — not implemented)

1D elementary rules — Rule 30 / 90 / 110 space-time diagrams (Wolfram's famous chaotic, fractal and Turing-complete rules) as an alternate scrolling view.
Brian's Brain — a 3-state automaton (on / dying / off) full of gliders; our hibernation state is a cousin of its “dying” state.
Wireworld — electrons flowing along wires; people build working computers in it.
Langton's Ant — a single agent writing to the grid; emergent “highway” after ~10,000 steps.
Larger-than-Life & Lenia — big radii and continuous states produce smooth, creature-like life forms.
Nutrient fields — colonies that consume local food and starve in depleted zones, like real agar.
Rule tables from text — import arbitrary rule tables (e.g. Golly's .rule format).
Sound generation — sonify colony size and births each generation.
GIF export — record a run as an animated GIF, not just one PNG.
Glider / spaceship library — a palette of known Life patterns (glider, LWSS, Gosper gun) to stamp down.
Multiplayer shared dishes — several people dropping objects into one world.
Evolutionary rule search — mutate growth parameters / B-S sets and select for interesting behavior.