01 / DEPOSIT
A million wanderers leave a trail.
Every agent drops a faint chemical mark wherever it goes. Alone, each mark is nothing. Together, over thousands of frames, they become a map the colony can read.
Life,
grown live.
A million simple agents, each following one rule, kept alive in texture memory. No one scripts the shapes they make — they organize themselves. Move your cursor and the colony flows toward it.
Watch it think Move your cursor through the colony
- Agents
- 1.05M
- Rule
- 1sense + turn
- Memory
- 2ping-pong buffers
- Repeat
- 0frames alike
02 / SENSE
Three sensors. One simple rule.
Each agent sniffs left, ahead, and right, then steers toward the strongest scent. That is the entire intelligence — no planning, no memory, just a turn toward more of what it already laid down.
03 / REINFORCE
Paths that work get wider.
The trail diffuses and fades every frame. Routes that agents keep reusing are reinforced faster than they decay; the rest dissolve. Efficiency survives. Waste evaporates.
04 / EMERGE
Networks no one designed.
From that loop — deposit, sense, reinforce — vein-like networks appear, split, and heal. It is the same math a real slime mold uses to solve mazes. Move your cursor and the whole colony comes to you.
Compute without a compute shader.
Agents live in a texture
Each pixel of a 1024×1024 float texture stores one agent's position and heading — over a million lives in one image.
Ping-pong framebuffers
A fragment pass reads the agent texture and the trail, computes each new state, and writes to a second texture. Then they swap.
Deposit as points
A million-vertex draw reads each agent's position in the vertex shader and additively stamps it into the trail map.
Diffuse & decay
A blur-plus-fade pass spreads and dims the trail every frame, so only reinforced paths persist.
Scroll changes the rules
Sensor angle, distance, and turn speed shift as you read — watch the same colony reorganize into new regimes.
Raw Three.js + R3F
Hand-written GLSL, custom render targets, manual pass sequencing. Honors prefers-reduced-motion.