Boardwalk
Try two, three, then four vendors. Two settle; three chase; four form pairs. The trail makes the odd-population failure visible.
The playroom
Tiny worlds. Strange equilibria.
The core study asks how agents protect a shared resource. These side experiments loosen one assumption at a time: must stability mean stillness? Must coordination converge? What kinds of motion can a field organize?
02 live applets
02 neighboring labs
01 next sketch
Loading the side room… Two deterministic sketches are getting into motion.
Juggling
Start at 1% timing error, 0.20 listening, and one controlled player. Raise the error, then add control back until the pattern recovers.
Watch the history, not just the snapshot. A configuration can look orderly for one instant while remaining unstable. Both applets expose the trajectory so recurring motion is not mistaken for convergence.
Conceptual demos, not grant evidence. They develop intuition and suggest future test fixtures. The reviewer path uses only Shared Resource and Common Harvest as its core examples.
Follow the vector field
Two mature labs, then an empty slot.
The first two links open finished experiments in Direction Field Lab. The third is a candidate for the next short interlude.
Live · Direction Field Lab
Next slot · sketch
Clebsch fields and random surface fluids
Build vorticity from scalar fields, project the flow, and release particles across a curved surface. The particles make an invisible field legible.
Open the fluid lab → Live · geometry processingDirection fields
Draw, decompose, and regularize fields on surfaces. This is the mathematical workbench underneath the moving pictures.
Visit Direction Field Lab →Icosahedron ants
Agents receive vertices on a sphere, collide while changing places, nearly converge, and then have their targets shuffled again.
Not built yetThe rule of the room
A question should become something you can perturb.
A demo earns its place here when changing one parameter reveals a qualitative change: settling becomes chasing, rhythm becomes collapse, or a hidden field becomes visible as motion.