Lab

Reaction

WORKING

Two imaginary chemicals — one feeds, one eats — obeying three rules per cell until they chase each other into a maze nobody drew.

Two imaginary chemicals — one feeds, one eats — obeying three rules per cell until they chase each other into a maze nobody drew.

The interesting part is a precision bug. An 8-bit channel counts in steps of 1/255, and one tick of this chemistry changes V by far less than that — so stored naively the whole reaction rounds to zero and freezes. The fix spends two channels per chemical, coarse value plus remainder, which buys roughly 1/65025 steps. RGBA holds U in RG and V in BA.

The feed/kill parameters were found by measurement, not by copying textbook values: the classic coral numbers (0.0545 / 0.062) sat inert under this discretisation. Sweeping eight pairs for 12k ticks each and scoring the spatial spread of V picked 0.038 / 0.060, which settles into the winding maze regime.

Ran
Outcome
CONFIRMED
Stack
WebGL · GLSL · FBO · Gray-Scott
Built
Wrote the Gray-Scott sim, packed both chemicals to 16-bit across RGBA to stop 8-bit rounding freezing the reaction, and swept feed/kill by measurement to find the maze regime.
Model
Claude Opus 5
Source
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