BFF Primordial Soup

What you are seeing

Each cell holds a 64-byte BFF program (tape)
Color = the tape's dominant opcode, compressed to one pixel (< > { } - + . , [ ])
Dark cells contain no opcode bytes
Falling entropy means the byte population is becoming less random
Uniform-color waves can signal an emerging replicator, but the image alone is not proof of replication

How to explore

Lower mutation to let persistent structures stabilize
Raise mutation to keep the soup turbulent
Lower max steps to speed up the run at the cost of fidelity
Randomize resets the soup while keeping the current controls

How it works

1) The substrate

240×135 grid of programs, each a 64-byte BFF tape. Instructions and data share the same bytes: there is no separate code memory. The initial soup is uniform random noise.

2) Interaction

Each epoch, nearby programs are greedily paired within a Chebyshev radius-2 neighborhood, concatenated, then interpreted together for up to 8192 steps before being split back into the grid.

3) Browser implementation

The simulation runs in a Web Worker to keep the page responsive at paper-scale defaults. The canvas shows one compressed pixel per tape using its dominant opcode rather than rendering all 64 bytes.

Inspired by Computational Life (Agüera y Arcas et al., 2024) — self-replication from random initial conditions with no designed fitness. Interpreter semantics were checked against the authors’ CuBFF reference implementation.