The Glider
A lopsided smudge that pushes itself forward one texel at a time, leaving nothing behind. Feed it a clean corridor and it will travel until the torus wraps it back into its own wake.
≈ 0.9 cells / tick
SmoothLife · continuous domain
Paint life.Watch it leave.
A continuous cellular automaton — Conway's rules dissolved into real numbers. Blobs crawl, colonies breed, and gliders starve. No cell is ever fully alive; none is ever fully dead.
Move your cursor across the field to seed life. It spreads on its own.
01
The Rule
Rafler, 2011 · SmoothLifeLConway's Game of Life counts eight discrete neighbours and flips a cell hard: on or off. SmoothLife replaces the count with an integral. It measures the density of life inside a small inner disk against the density in the ring around it, then nudges each cell up or down by a continuous amount every tick.
Life is born where the neighbourhood ring sits between b1 and b2. It survives where the ring sits between d1 and d2. Everywhere else it decays. Because the thresholds are smooth, the boundaries between order and death are soft — which is exactly why gliders here glide instead of jump.
ParameterValue
outer radius · rₐ11.0 cells
inner radius · rᵢrₐ / 3
birth interval · b0.257 → 0.336
survival interval · d0.365 → 0.549
edge width · αₙ0.028
state width · αₘ0.147
time step · dt0.115 / tick
topologytoroidal
02
Field Notes
Observed on the grid aboveThe Colony
A fat ring of density that thins at the middle, pinches, and becomes two. Its rim burns plasma-gold at the moment of fission — the only time a cell approaches fully alive before falling back.
splits every ≈ 40 ticksThe Starve
Too much life and the ring over-crowds; too little and the disk cannot hold. Either way the density slides toward the void and the phosphor cools. Nothing here is permanent — that is the whole point.
half-life ≈ 12 ticks
03
The Readout
How the grid is colouredVoid
#0A0A06
Density near zero. A dead cell, cooled to the substrate.
Life mint
#33D6A6
Stable, mid-high density. The steady bulk of any living body.
Plasma gold
#F2B840
The membrane and the hot cores — where density is changing fastest.
Grid
#0F1410
The phosphor lattice every cell sits on. Structure without state.