# Lenia: Continuous Cellular Automata

**Track:** Simulation & Complexity — Advanced Creative Coding — proposed (50)
**Framework / surface:** GLSL
**Level:** Insane
**Prerequisites:** 2D Cellular Automata / Game of Life, Noise in Shaders → FBM

**In one line:** Smooth kernels and growth functions; discovering gliders.

## Theory, aesthetics & inspiration

Lenia generalizes Conway's Game of Life into the continuum: states, space, and time all become smooth. A radial kernel weights each cell's neighborhood, and a bell-shaped growth function nudges the value up or down, so the discrete birth and death rules dissolve into gradients. Bert Wang-Chak Chan introduced the system in 2019, cataloguing a bestiary of self-organizing creatures — most famously Orbium, a gliding ring that drifts and turns while holding its shape. The aesthetic is soft and biological: luminous membranes, rippling cilia, and organisms that breathe, rotate, and recover from perturbation, suggesting protozoa under a microscope rather than cells on a grid.