I was inspired to create this project after reading an article published on Nature by three professors from the Karl-Franzens University Graz. In their article they detailed the creation of a primordial particle simulation that was composed of a small simulation space with many identical point-particles with random initial positions. Given different laws of physics describing how these particles would move and behave in the simulation (different gravity coefficient, repelling coefficients etc.) they observed that the particles would arrange themselves into different patterns. In summary, complex structures would emerge from basic particles and basic laws of physics. What fascinated me was under a specific laws of physics the emergent structures would be recursively self-replicating cell like structures.

Although no code was given in the research paper, I programmed the simulation environment based off of the descriptions and the mathematical equations provided. Sure enough, under specific laws of physics emerged life-like emergent structures (simulation example shown on the left). As it turns out, these life-like structures do not only emerge in a 2-dimensional space, but in any n-dimensional simulation environment.

The final simulation was 128 lines of code. All versions considered, I wrote ~500 lines of code in the totality of this project.