page two

The Garden

Two imaginary chemicals live in the box below. One feeds, one kills, and both spread. That is the entire ruleset — every pattern you are about to see is an accident of those three sentences. Drag your cursor across it to seed more of the second chemical and watch what the first one does about it.

Click and drag on the canvas to paint.

Recipe
Palette
Now running —

What you are looking at

  1. A

    The feed

    Chemical A is topped up everywhere at the feed rate. Left alone it simply fills the box and nothing happens.

  2. B

    The reaction

    Where A and B meet, two Bs plus one A become three Bs. B eats A and multiplies, which is why a single dot spreads outwards.

  3. K

    The kill

    B is removed at the kill rate. The tension between growth and removal is what freezes the spread into stripes, spots and mazes.

This is the Gray-Scott model. Nudging feed and kill by a thousandth can turn a coral reef into a field of dividing cells, so the sliders are worth abusing. The starting arrangement is derived from today's date, which means the garden you found on arrival is one nobody saw yesterday and nobody will see tomorrow. When you are done here, the Chimes turns the same number into a tune.