BioChaos is a high-performance cellular automata simulator that models emergent behaviors based on simple mathematical rules. Originally inspired by Conway's Game of Life, this engine allows you to manipulate birth and survival parameters in real-time, witnessing how complex structures evolve, stabilize, or descend into chaos. It serves as a powerful sandbox for exploring chaos theory, artificial life, and systems thinking.
The simulation runs on a highly optimized HTML5 Canvas API loop, utilizing typed arrays (Uint8Array) for O(1) grid lookups. To maintain an Interaction to Next Paint (INP) score below 200ms, grid computations are deferred to requestAnimationFrame, decoupling the physics step from the UI render loop. The Sandbox Demo Engine uses memory-isolated state objects, ensuring your active configuration is frozen and perfectly restored when the demo is interrupted.
Future iterations will introduce continuous-valued cellular automata (like Lenia), supporting smooth fluid-dynamics-like visuals. We also plan to add a genome library to save and share custom rule sets, alongside a WebGPU implementation to simulate millions of cells at 60fps. An ambient generative audio engine tied to population density is also on the roadmap.
A curated list of research, tools, and documentation related to cellular automata and chaos theory.
Conway's Game of Life - Wikipedia LifeWiki - Pattern Database & Rules MDN Web Docs: Canvas API Cellular Automaton - Mathematical Theory