Morphogen

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What am I looking at?

This is a real, running simulation — a Gray-Scott reaction-diffusion system, the kind of math Alan Turing described in 1952 to explain how two chemicals diffusing and reacting can spontaneously produce spots, stripes, and coral-like patterns without a blueprint.

There is only one of it. It runs on a server, ticking forward every couple of minutes whether anyone is watching or not, and its full state is saved to a database between ticks. Everyone who has ever loaded this page has looked at the same organism, at the same moment of its one continuous life, since it was born.

Its parameters drift very slowly over months, so it visibly ages into different phases of its life. Touching or clicking it injects a small pulse of reactant at that spot — a real nudge to the shared pattern, gone anonymously the moment it's applied. Nothing about you is stored.