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Soup of Life - Watch life emerge in your browser
Posted: March 6th, 2026, 4:10 pm
by maybetomorrow
Hi, I kind of stumbled into this forum recently. Nice to meet you.
I built a simulation (
https://soupof.life) mostly for fun, partly as a reaction to the 2-second attention span world. My wife (PhD in evolution) kept challenging me throughout the process, and I got blunt feedback from my kids, who check their worlds every morning.
I put it on the internet, people discovered it, and now runs have been going for hours, days, even weeks.
There are no controls. You just watch it. It runs in the browser.
I’m still working on it. I wrote down some of the concepts here:
https://soupof.life/concepts
Thought people here might find it interesting
Re: Soup of Life - Watch life emerge in your browser
Posted: March 6th, 2026, 4:19 pm
by I6_I6
maybetomorrow wrote: March 6th, 2026, 4:10 pm
Hi, I kind of stumbled into this forum recently. Nice to meet you.
I built a simulation (
https://soupof.life) mostly for fun, partly as a reaction to the 2-second attention span world. My wife (PhD in evolution) kept challenging me throughout the process, and I got blunt feedback from my kids, who check their worlds every morning.
I put it on the internet, people discovered it, and now runs have been going for hours, days, even weeks.
There are no controls. You just watch it. It runs in the browser.
I’m still working on it. I wrote down some of the concepts here:
https://soupof.life/concepts
Thought people here might find it interesting
Cool! It's pretty entertaining to watch. It's absolutely packed with features! Your second link doesn't work, though.
But how does it relate to CA?
Re: Soup of Life - Watch life emerge in your browser
Posted: March 6th, 2026, 4:45 pm
by maybetomorrow
I6_I6 wrote: March 6th, 2026, 4:19 pm
maybetomorrow wrote: March 6th, 2026, 4:10 pm
Hi, I kind of stumbled into this forum recently. Nice to meet you.
I built a simulation (
https://soupof.life) mostly for fun, partly as a reaction to the 2-second attention span world. My wife (PhD in evolution) kept challenging me throughout the process, and I got blunt feedback from my kids, who check their worlds every morning.
I put it on the internet, people discovered it, and now runs have been going for hours, days, even weeks.
There are no controls. You just watch it. It runs in the browser.
I’m still working on it. I wrote down some of the concepts here:
https://soupof.life/concepts
Thought people here might find it interesting
Cool! It's pretty entertaining to watch. It's absolutely packed with features! Your second link doesn't work, though.
But how does it relate to CA?
Thanks! And good catch, the concepts link should work now.
You’re right that it isn’t a cellular automaton in the strict sense.
But to me it felt similar: simple local rules interacting over time producing larger patterns. Organisms follow basic behavioral and metabolic rules, and evolution emerges through mutation and selection as they compete for resources.
To be honest, I only learned about Conway’s Life after people on Reddit mentioned it to me. But when I started reading about CA it felt familiar. The same idea of watching complex behavior emerge from simple systems.
Re: Soup of Life - Watch life emerge in your browser
Posted: March 7th, 2026, 11:29 am
by breaker's glider gun
Maybe there should be an "agent-based/ML" subforum in the sandbox \:P
It might be interesting, since there is some amount of overlap. I say sandbox because it's different enough from CA to warrant some separation.