Particle Life

This is fascinating. It's like a more complex game of life than John connoway's. It's crazy that little creatures seem to form at such small scales easily with these parameters. It's almost like the parameters of our real universe intentionally made it difficult to form life, rather than easy as some people seem to think.

Life, uh, finds its particles.

how does it show it? what is meant by life? are rules necessary or just transitions? what enables rules at all?

Physical and chemical properties of organic molecules give rise to emergent life-like structures/patterns. Molecules interacting via hydrogen bonding, solubility, hydrophobicity and hydrophilicity - repulsion and attraction - can produce protomembranes under the right conditions.

In this demonstration, particles with certain rules can interact in such a way that self-organizing structures emerge.

They are less creatures than molecules. Now, mind you, as some complex sets of rules approach steady state I can pretend they are far-flung stellar empires with colors ascribed to each type of system of government (and have).

What is fooling you is the motion. This is sustained because the system has no conservation principles built in. You can make A-B pairs where B is attracted to A, A is repelled by B, and off they go, zoom. Were the meta-rules devised such that conservation of energy or momentum and such were baked in to whatever system you devised, you would see less exciting structures which would more resemble a late-stage pentamino explosion in the Game of Life.

With a sufficiently large processor, I would like to see this in three dimensions and more options for force, such as dropping off as the inverse of r or r-cubed or even r * log(r), or some "repulsive at a distance, attractive at very close quarters" particles. I have a feeling that such a system would grind to a halt even with clever optimizations.