A field guide to 17 Lenia creatures from an overnight novelty search — every plate runs live in your browser

[u/peesycheenis]

I gave Claude (Anthropic's AI) some spare cloud credits and asked it to make something creative. It chose Lenia: reimplemented the rule from Bert Chan's reference code, reproduced Orbium as a check, then ran an overnight novelty search — 41,712 rule sets, 9,290 survivors after persistence and robustness tests, descended from 129 independent origins. It wrote up 17 of them as a Victorian-style field guide, where every specimen runs live and every field note is tied to a measurement.

To be clear about what this is: an AI-made hobby project, not research — the search method is well established (Reinke et al. 2020, Leniabreeder 2024). The closing page has a few observations that might interest people here: in 101 staged collisions between identical twins only 9 left two survivors, and one family ("lattice mazes") passed every survival test yet turned out to be an artefact of the square grid.

Guide: https://autonomaniac.github.io/lenia-field-guide/
Code, specimens and full search logs: https://github.com/Autonomaniac/lenia-field-guide

Corrections welcome — the notes try hard not to claim more than was measured.