Particle Life simulation in browser using WebGPU

Summary

Particle Life simulation in browser using WebGPU 2025 May 15 If you don't care about the explanation and want a direct link to the simulation, here you go. You might know that I'm a sucker for physics simulations, and particle simulations in particular. Usually I implement something based on conventional physics, but recently I've stumbled upon a funny non-physical model that can display...well, let's call it life-like behavior. I've made a prototype in C++ using my pet engine, but then I decided it would be fun to try making it run in browser, using the WebGPU API. It works surprisingly well, and can produce fun simulations like this: In this post I'll describe how it works under the hood. Contents The Particle Life Model There are quite a number of resources (primarily, videos) online that talk about this model, for example this, this, and this, and also this one talks about the exact formulas used in the simulation. Due to a rather pretentious name composed of two overused words, googling "particle life" doesn't bring stuff of any relevance (apart from the YouTube videos), so I wasn't able to trace the origins of this model. One video claims that this model was inspired by some microbiology studies, which seems believable given how organic and mobile the resulting simulations look. This model isn't in any way related to Conway's Game of Life (despite the name). It's more like Particle Lenia, if anything, though the rules are much simpler. The core idea goes like this: we run a typical physics simulation with point particles, but the forces between particles can be asymmetric: particle A can attract particle B, but particle B can repel particle A (or attract it with a larger/smaller force, etc). This immediately violates Newton's third law, thus it violates almost all conservation laws (specifically, energy, momentum, and angular momentum conservation). This might sound strange and unphysical, but We're not bound by physical laws when coding simulations, This brin...