Emergence lab

Many agents following simple local rules exhibit emergent behaviour, seen in everything from ecosystems to economies.

This is a working bench for multi-agent orchestration across Claude and Codex. The higher tier models plan and orcestrate while lower tiers code and verify with clear boundries. Cross family orchestration, improves outcomes and catches failure modes that are missed with a single model, at more than twice the cost...

Run the app in a browser

View the research: Emergent behaviour from nature to management theory.

Julia set, escape-time render from the lab

The twelve

Twelve deterministic kernels behind one renderer. Each is a different
discipline's way of pointing at the same thing: local rules, global form.

Gray-Scott reaction diffusion. Chemistry's version of the question.
Abelian sandpile. Self-organised criticality in one toy.
Conway's Game of Life. The original, and still the cleanest.
Belousov-Zhabotinsky waves. The reaction that taught chemistry about excitable media.
Boids. Flocking from three local rules.
Lorenz attractor. Where deterministic equations stop being predictable.
Diffusion-limited aggregation. How dendrites and lightning agree.
Elementary cellular automata. Wolfram's one-dimensional zoo.
Brian's Brain. Three states. Somehow it breathes.
Mandelbrot, Julia, Burning Ship. Iterated maps as the geometry of feedback.

Gray-Scott is the priority kernel. The others are calibrated and held.

Run it

npm install
npm run dev

Open the URL Vite prints, normally http://localhost:5173/.

Checks:

npm run verify   # types, kernel tests, production build
npm test
npm run build

Stack

Vite and TypeScript throughout. Kernels are pure deterministic numerics
with no runtime dependencies. The renderer is moving to a quality-first
WebGL2/GPU path, with Canvas 2D kept as a fallback and debug surface.
Legacy browsers are not a target.

Adding a simulation

Extend the SimKernel contract in docs/INTERFACE.md if the new sim needs it.
Add the kernel under src/sims/<name>/ and wire the gallery in src/app/**.
Write the essay in essays/<name>.md.

There is no fixed split of the codebase by model — any agent may work any
part of it. Multi-agent work runs through autometta (a worker/verifier loop)
when parallel work and cross-checking are wanted. The kernel contract in
docs/INTERFACE.md stays a reviewed boundary. See
MODELS.md.

Repository layout

emergence-lab/
  src/                    # kernels, renderer, controls, gallery
    sims/<name>/kernel.ts # deterministic kernel
    app/                  # renderer, gallery, controls, presets
  essays/                 # one .md per sim
  docs/
    INTERFACE.md          # the SimKernel contract
    PUBLISH-WORKFLOW.md   # publish-safety hooks and remotes
  HANDOFF.md              # current state and next-run brief

Publish and secrets

The public branch tracks a clean history. Pre-commit and pre-push hooks
are armed against personal paths and against pushing private branches to
the public remote. The full workflow is in
docs/PUBLISH-WORKFLOW.md.

Secrets live in .env.local, gitignored. Never commit them.