Tiamat

Design cellular automata and watch simple rules grow into complex worlds

Create rules, seed patterns, transform them and explore the boundary between order and chaos.

Cells · custom rules · saved patterns · generative colour

What happens here

Tiamat is a cellular automata sandbox for designing rules and watching complex structures emerge from simple local interactions. Each cell reads its neighbourhood, changes state, and contributes to the next generation of the field.

Seed a field

Paint cells, place a saved pattern, choose a field preset or begin with a random state.

Read neighbours

Every cell evaluates nearby cells according to the selected neighbourhood and rulestring.

Advance together

Cells appear, survive or disappear at each step, turning local decisions into global motion.

Change the system

Edit the rule, speed, colours, patterns or starting field and compare what grows.

What you can explore

Small edits can move the same field from stillness to repetition or sustained chaos. Tiamat keeps the rule and the canvas close together so those changes are easy to see.

Start with a known rule

Load a preset world, then observe its stable forms, oscillators, moving structures and collisions.

Change one condition

Edit a birth or survival value and compare how quickly structure becomes sparse, dense or chaotic.

Build a reusable pattern

Draw a seed, save it to the pattern bank, then rotate or transform it before placing new copies.

Compose with colour

Adjust cell colours, gradients and fading to make generations readable or treat the field as generative art.

One rule, radically different worlds

Tiamat accepts BS, SB and HROT rulestring notation. BS and SB describe birth and survival counts in different orders; HROT supports larger-than-totalistic neighbourhoods. Exact outcomes also depend on the seed and visual treatment.

Colourful Tiamat cellular automata field without a device mockup — **Simulation field**A single rule grows into a dense world of moving, colliding and repeating structures.

Tiamat rule field and colourful cell neighbourhood — **Pattern neighbourhood**The field makes the local cells around each generation visible while a pattern develops.

Annotated Tiamat cellular automata rule editor — **Rule editor**Birth and survival values, neighbourhood and generations are edited in one focused workspace.

Controls and workflow

Move between quick experiments and saved studies without leaving the simulation surface.

Choose

Load a starting point

Select a field preset, rule or saved pattern.

Seed

Set initial conditions

Paint cells, place patterns or generate a random field.

Run

Control time

Play, pause, change speed or step through the simulation.

Transform

Change the experiment

Edit rules, rotate patterns and tune colour transitions.

Keep

Save useful parts

Store fields, rules, gradients and patterns to revisit later.

At the beginning there was only Chaos… then a rule gave it shape.

Emergent Systems Sandboxes

These projects explore the same central idea at different scales: complex behaviour can emerge from many simple local rules.

I build tools for exploring how complex behaviour emerges from simple rules.

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