From Conway to Lenia

A step by step guide from discrete to continuous cellular automata

Conway's Game of Life is the most famous 2D discrete cellular automata, developed by the late mathematician John Conway.

Lenia, a continuous cellular automata, was evolved from the Game of Life. But how was it evolved? What are the steps and the rationales behind? This Google Colab notebook guides you through each stage, from the discrete Game of Life, to an intermediate system called Primordia, finally to Lenia, extended Lenia, and beyond...

In this Colab Notebook, you can modify any code and see how that affects the results.

1. Open "Preparations" section and run the two code parts inside (click the "Run" triangle on the left). Wait some time for the runtime to connect.
2. Choose a code part and change the code inside (e.g. change world size, change R, modify kernel, or anything).
3. Run the code part (click the "Run" triangle on the left).
4. New results will be shown below the code part. Click "Play" triangle under the movie to see the simulation.

More about Lenia and Primordia: https://chakazul.github.io/lenia.html

Open in Google Colab

Source in GitHub