Cellular Automata Gone Wrong

worflam beta injects probabilistic perturbations into 1D cellular automata, spawns parallel timeline forks, and watches them merge when states realign — rendered live on the GPU.

256elementary rules
parallel timelines
GPUshader rendering

A laboratory for the multiverse

worflam beta extends traditional 1D cellular automata with multi-world branching, real-time metrics, and custom rule design.

worflam beta · live preview
SIMULATING:
Live · interactive

Probabilistic error forks

Inject per-row noise and watch perturbations split the canonical timeline into parallel, colour-coded forks that evolve concurrently. Switch rules below — it is running live.

  • Tunable error probability per generation
  • Each fork tracked as its own lineage
  • Forks merge automatically when states realign
worflam beta · heatmap
Divergence heatmap of forked timelines
Divergence heatmap

See where universes drift apart

The heatmap renders cell-level divergence across every active timeline, turning abstract perturbation growth into a readable temperature field from convergence to chaos.

  • Per-cell agreement scored across forks
  • Cyan → magenta gradient maps drift intensity
  • Spot error envelopes and consolidation at a glance
worflam beta · sum (3D)
3D voxel rendering of forked automata
Volumetric view

Generations as physical space

Render the full branching history as a rotatable 3D voxel stack. Each fork becomes its own layer in depth, so you can orbit, pan, and inspect how lineages peel away over time.

  • WebGL + Three.js voxel renderer
  • Fork layers separated along the depth axis
  • Orbit, pan and zoom any configuration
worflam beta · split
Split view comparing timelines
Compare mode

Split timelines side by side

Detach active forks into their own stacked grids to compare structures directly, or composite them with XOR and Sum modes to surface high-density intersections.

  • Overlay, XOR, Sum and Split display modes
  • Isolate any fork into its own panel
  • Toggle colour and toroidal wrap instantly

Everything in the workbench

The full toolkit for designing, perturbing and analysing automata.

256 elementary rules

Every Wolfram rule from 0 to 255, edited by number or by toggling individual neighbourhood output bits.

Custom graph rules

Compose generating functions as typed node graphs — chain rules through AND, OR, XOR and NOT operators.

State inspector & metrics

Track alive, forked and mixed cell counts, fork ages and merge events row by row, bit by bit.

Automatic merging

When a forked row becomes identical to a timeline missing that fork, the engine resolves and merges it.

Boundary conditions

Switch between zero-clamped edges and a toroidal wrap to change how perturbations travel the grid.

Deterministic seeding

Every run is reproducible from its seed, so any branch-and-merge graph can be replayed exactly.

Start branching timelines

Open the workbench and watch a single deterministic rule fracture into a living, merging multiverse.