Nine organisms
Everything on this page is alive somewhere else.
The lab grows nine forms. None of them is invented. Each is a real strategy for staying alive — sleep through the famine, glue yourself to the rock, chase the gradient, eat the sunlight, eat the neighbours — and each one was solved by a cell with no brain, long before anything had a brain to solve it with.
Drag any organism to turn it. Open one to read it in full, then take it back to the plate and grow it.
How the forms are drawn
Nothing on this page is a model file. Every organism is a signed distance function — a few lines of arithmetic that answer “how far is the nearest surface from this point” — raymarched live in your browser and then quantised through the same ordered dither the culture plate uses. That is why they are made of the same dots as everything else here, and why the page loads no assets to show you a three-dimensional thing.
It is also why it runs on a laptop from 2013. The render target is one sample per dither cell, so a 600-pixel view is actually solved at 200 by 200.