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Investigating · emergence

Particle Life

Can lifelike structure — cells, membranes, self-propelling creatures — emerge from nothing but a few colours of particle pulling and pushing on each other by simple rules?

▶ Launch the interactive simulation

How the lab tests it

Hundreds of particles in a handful of colours, each colour attracting or repelling every other by a random interaction matrix (the 'genome'), integrated on a torus. Tune the matrix and the seed and watch what self-organises; measure cluster structure, order parameters, and the pair-correlation g(r).

What it looks for

open-ended emergence — gases, cells, gliders, and self-replicating blobs arise from the matrix alone, with no notion of 'life' written into the rules. PHS's emergent substrate and its deepest research thread.

This is one world in the PHS lab — 91 interactive simulations, each posing a question and measuring the answer. See the catalogued findings.