alife_lenia — 2D artificial-life op

• Data kinds: image → image

• Call: fullseye.apply(img, "alife_lenia", a=0.5, b=0.5) (the 2-D model is one image plus two scalar knobs a,b∈[0,1])

*The figure is the real output on a synthetic 128×128 input. Left: input, right: output (a non-image return value is shown as the value itself).*

Usage

Lenia continuous cellular automaton (Bert Chan, Complex Systems 2019).

Lenia generalises Conway's Life to a *continuous* state space, a continuous

neighbourhood and a continuous time step. The field u starts as the image.

A normalised Gaussian ring kernel K of radius R (peaking at relative radius

0.5) gives the potential U = K (*) u as a circular convolution; the growth

mapping G(U) = 2 exp(-(U-mu)^2 / (2 sigma^2)) - 1 is in [-1, 1] and is

integrated explicitly as u <- clip(u + dt * G(U), 0, 1).

`a` sets the growth centre mu = 0.08 + 0.25a, its width

sigma = 0.03 + 0.05a and the time step dt = 0.10 + 0.15a; `b` sets the

number of steps 1 + int(19b). The output is deliberately not binarised

-- keeping intermediate values is exactly what separates Lenia from a

discrete Life rule.

Detailed usage guide

• gallery2d_physics_alife_3d family guide

References (sample data, literature)

• Sample-data catalog (download URLs / licences) — 2-D uses skimage.data (BSD/public domain) plus synthetic images; 3-D lists download URLs for real data sources (Stanford, PDS, …).

• Operator provenance and references — the sources of the research/methods this op family came from.

• The canonical algorithm (author, year) and its uses are named in the family usage guide above.

Try it in Studio

The program below has been verified to run (same input as the figure). In Studio's help this block becomes buttons that load and run it on the spot.

alife_lenia 0.50 0.50

▸ Load this pipeline  ·  Load & run

Runnable examples (verified samples that actually call this op)

• gallery2d_physics_alife_3d — py -3.11 examples/gallery2d_physics_alife_3d.py

Ops the type connects to (they accept image as input)

identity · gaussian · mean_box · bilateral · unsharp · median · min_filter · max_filter

Same category (artificial-life)

alife_gray_scott · alife_turing · alife_life_step · alife_cyclic_ca · alife_perona_malik · alife_curvature_flow · alife_dla · alife_reaction_bz

*Provenance: ops.py — 2D operator registry. This per-op note is generated by tools/opdocs.py md (do not hand-edit).*

© 2026 Kazufumi Furuse — Fullseye operator documentation. Licensed under Apache-2.0.