The Lab

Questions I couldn't stop poking at.

Long before any of this paid the bills, I'd get snagged on an idea — why a doubling bet always loses, how a single neuron teaches itself, why almost every Wikipedia article secretly funnels to Philosophy — and the only way to shake it loose was to build the thing and watch it move.

Most of these are those builds, dragged out of dead libraries and Python 2 scripts and rebuilt to run right here in front of you. Most are new: a table of liars arguing itself to death, glowing ink you can stir, a fractal coastline you can fall into for ever, gravity you can fling, sand that sings, a tree that grows toward your light, and a few dozen more ways to watch simple rules do astonishing things.

Poke at them. Break them. That is what they are for.

43 experiments to try

Original build

Sneak

Cross the board without stepping into a guard's line of sight.

GameStealthTypeScriptSeeded
Open
Ported to TypeScript

Zipf's Law

Pull any Wikipedia article and watch fifty thousand words obey one curve.

LinguisticsPower lawTypeScriptRecharts
Open
Ported to TypeScript

Getting to Philosophy

Follow the first link on any Wikipedia article and you end up at Philosophy.

GraphsEmergenceTypeScript
Open
Ported to TypeScript

Gambler's Demise

Why the Martingale system always loses, run thousands of times over.

ProbabilityMonte CarloTypeScriptRecharts
Open
Ported to TypeScript

A Neuron Learns

Eleven lines of Python teaching themselves a rule — watch the error flow backwards.

Machine learningGradient descentTypeScript
Open
Rebuilt in React + Canvas

Morphball

Layered parallax depth from flat shapes and different scroll speeds.

GraphicsReactCanvasParallax
Open
Original — built for the Lab

Tower of Hanoi

Three pegs, one rule, and a recursion you can watch think — then the arithmetic of the 64 golden discs.

PuzzleRecursionAlgorithmsTypeScript
Open
Original — built for the Lab

A Billionth of a Degree

A hundred pendulums dropped a billionth of a degree apart swing as one — for about nine seconds.

ChaosPhysicsCanvasLyapunov exponentDeterministic
Open
Original — built for the Lab

Fireflies

A hundred and forty fireflies, no leader, no count — turn one dial and the meadow starts flashing as one.

EmergenceSynchronisationKuramoto modelCanvasPhase transition
Open
Original — built for the Lab

Murmuration

Ever wondered how a flock of birds or a school of fish moves so perfectly in sync? Nobody leads. Each one watches about seven neighbours, and the whole crowd turns as one. Be the falcon, or the shark.

EmergenceBoidsCollective motionSchoolingCanvasSpatial hashing
Open
Original — built for the Lab

Every Drawing Is Circles

Draw anything with one line, and watch a chain of spinning circles draw it back — usually with far fewer circles than you would guess.

Fourier seriesEpicyclesSignal processingCanvasCompression
Open
Original — built for the Lab

The Galton Board

Pour beads through a triangle of pins. No bead knows where it is going, and the pile still lands on a curve drawn in advance.

ProbabilityCentral limit theoremBinomial distributionCanvasStatistics
Open
Original — built for the Lab

Turing Patterns

Two chemicals and one rule grow leopard spots, zebra stripes, coral and dividing cells — and only two numbers tell them apart.

EmergenceReaction–diffusionGray–Scott modelWebGLMorphogenesis
Open
Original — built for the Lab

The Sandpile

Drop sand one grain at a time and the pile tunes itself to the edge of collapse — then avalanches of every size, on a perfect power law.

Self-organised criticalityPower lawFractalCanvasCellular automaton
Open
Original — built for the Lab

What Sorting Sounds Like

Nine ways to put a row in order, played as music — and on 1,024 values, a gap of nearly thirty to one you can hear.

AlgorithmsSortingWeb AudioCanvasComplexity
Open
Original — built for the Lab

Ink

Pour glowing ink into black water and drag it into vortices, billows and mushroom plumes — a real fluid, solved sixty times a second.

PhysicsFluid dynamicsStable FluidsWebGLMultigrid
Open
Original — built for the Lab

Strange Attractor

Twenty thousand points of light trace Lorenz's butterfly. Drop a knot of 500 in one spot and watch the wings tear it apart.

ChaosLorenz attractorLyapunov exponentWebGL2Dynamical systems
Open
Original — built for the Lab

Infinite Coastline

One line of algebra, z → z² + c, and a coastline you can fall into for ten billion times magnification without ever reaching the bottom.

FractalsMandelbrot setJulia setsWebGL2Numerical precision
Open
Original — built for the Lab

The Game of Life

Four rules about neighbours, four million cells, and no designer — yet it builds guns, spaceships and, in principle, a working computer.

EmergenceCellular automataConway's LifeWebGLComputation
Open
Original — built for the Lab

Harmonograph

Two pendulums, one pen and half a minute of friction draw a figure no hand could — and the musical fifths close while the detuned ones never do.

PendulumsLissajous figuresMusic and mathsCanvasDamped oscillation
Open
Original — built for the Lab

Ripple Tank

Two dippers in a tank of light. Where their waves meet, the water doubles — or stops dead. Drop a stone, drag a wake, paint a wall.

WavesInterferenceDiffractionWebGL2Wave equation
Open
Original — built for the Lab

Chladni Plates

Ten thousand grains of sand on a ringing metal plate. Hit the right note and they run into a figure on their own. Miss it by a few hertz and they only churn.

WavesResonanceAcousticsBessel functionsCanvasSound
Open
Original — built for the Lab

Slingshot

Pull back and fling a planet into a sky where everything pulls on everything — the dotted line bends round the stars before you let go, and two galaxies tear each other into tails.

GravityN-bodyThree-body problemSymplectic integrationCanvas
Open
Original — built for the Lab

Langton's Ant

One ant, one rule, no randomness — ten thousand steps of pure chaos, and then, out of nowhere, it starts building a road and never stops.

EmergenceCellular automataTurmitesCanvasReversibility
Open
Original — built for the Lab

Grow a Tree

No blueprint, just light — a tree grows itself out of a seed in twelve seconds, flowers, burns gold, drops its leaves, holds the snow, and reaches for any light you paint in the sky.

EmergenceSpace colonizationPipe modelCanvasBotany
Open
Original — built for the Lab

Three Doors

A car behind one door, goats behind two. The host opens a goat. Thousands of readers, PhDs among them, swore switching makes no difference — play ten thousand games and watch them lose the argument.

ProbabilityConditional probabilityMonte CarloGame showParadox
Open
Original — built for the Lab

Labyrinth

Six ways to carve a maze, each with its own handwriting — then a wave of coloured light floods it and a gold thread snaps to the exit.

Graph theorySpanning treesSearch algorithmsCanvasGame
Open
Original — built for the Lab

No Two Alike

Snow crystals grow live from a single frozen seed — six perfect arms, no blueprint. Pick a sky on Nakaya's diagram and grow your own.

Cellular automataCrystal growthSymmetryDiffusionCanvas
Open
Original — built for the Lab

Silk

A silk curtain billowing in a breeze. Grab it, throw a ball through it, cut it with scissors and watch the torn edges flutter.

PhysicsVerlet integrationConstraintsWebGL2Simulation
Open
Original — built for the Lab

The Golden Angle

A sunflower is one number. Turn it by a tenth of a degree and the seeds collapse into spokes.

PhyllotaxisGolden ratioFibonacciNumber theoryCanvas
Open
Original — built for the Lab

Lightning

A storm grown one cell at a time from a single rule. Plant a lightning rod and watch the strikes bend toward it.

FractalsDielectric breakdownDiffusion-limited aggregationLaplace equationCanvas
Open
Original — built for the Lab

Never Repeats

A marble floor that covers the plane perfectly and never repeats — tap any tile and watch its neighbourhood light up all over the floor.

Aperiodic tilingGolden ratioQuasicrystalsGeometryCanvas
Open
Original — built for the Lab

Stained Glass

A cathedral window that leads itself: every pane is the ground nearest one seed, the sun moves behind it, and its colours pour across the floor.

GeometryVoronoi diagramDelaunay triangulationLloyd's algorithmCanvas
Open
Original — built for the Lab

One at a Time

Fire electrons through two slits one by one. Each lands as a single dot — and the dots still draw stripes that only make sense if every one went through both.

Quantum mechanicsDouble slitWave–particle dualityCanvasMeasurement
Open
Original — built for the Lab

Aurora

Stand on a frozen lake under the northern lights, then follow the light back to where it starts: particles spiralling down Earth's magnetic field into two rings round the poles.

Space physicsMagnetismBoris pusherWebGLSpectroscopy
Open
Original — built for the Lab

Pendulum Wave

Fifteen pendulums that never touch each other snake, split into groups, dissolve into chaos and snap back into line every minute — and you can hear it.

WavesBeatsOscillatorsCanvasSound
Open
Original — built for the Lab

Why 42°

Trace sunlight through a single raindrop and watch the rays pile up at one angle — then see that pile-up paint a double rainbow, a dark band, a fogbow and a rainbow in a garden hose.

OpticsRefractionColourCanvasWeather
Open
Original — built for the Lab

Pi from Chaos

Drop needles on floorboards, throw darts, pick random numbers, slam two blocks into a wall — π turns up every time. Only one of them is any good at it.

ProbabilityMonte CarloNumber theoryPhysicsCanvasSound
Open

Unlisted · one more thing

Lab

Changing the set…

Every act the nav sign and the wordmark can perform — lightning, ash, folded paper, phosphor rain, fission — all running at once, on loop, in one grid.

Open the theatre→
Four-dimensional geometry

Tesseract

Sixteen vertices. Four dimensions. A perspective that refuses to sit still.

Enter the experiment →
Original — built for the Lab

Mafia

A parlour game of liars, simulated whole — watch the table argue itself to death, or take a seat at it.

GameSimulationSocial deductionDeterministicAgents
Open
Rebuilt in React + SVG

Hexalated

A hex-grid flood puzzle — clear the whole board in the fewest moves.

GameReactSVGDaily puzzlesAI race
Open
Rebuilt in React + Canvas

Ballistica

A turn-based tank duel on terrain you erase pixel by pixel — undermine the hill, drown the tank.

GamePhysicsCanvasDestructible terrainAI
Open