Morphe 🌀

Morphe is a reaction-diffusion pattern generator. Two chemical fields feed, kill, and diffuse across a grid, growing into spots, worms, coral, and maze-like patterns entirely from local rules. No two runs look quite the same. Named for the Greek morphe (form/shape), the same process Alan Turing proposed in 1952 as how pattern emerges in living things.

⚙️ How It Works

1. Pick a preset, or set your own feed and kill rates by hand.
2. Draw directly on the grid. Click-drag to seed new growth, Ctrl/Cmd-drag to erase.
3. Watch it evolve, or nudge it yourself and see where it goes.

✨ Key Features

🧪 Named presets Different regions of the parameter space have their own character, from dividing spots to endless turbulence, drawn from decades of Gray-Scott exploration. Every reset varies its starting seed, so the same preset never looks quite the same twice.

🖌️ Live drawing Paint seeds straight onto the simulation and watch the pattern respond in real time.

🎨 Colour & look A full draggable gradient editor with a range of colour schemes, including perceptual gradients, coral and bioluminescent tones, and ink-on-paper monochrome, plus an Emboss mode for a liquid-mercury shading look. Colour can also respond to age, so freshly changed areas read differently from ones left untouched.

🌊 Evolve Let feed and kill rates drift slowly over time for a living, breathing version of the pattern, rather than sitting still.

🌱 Auto-seed & Auto-restart Auto-seed keeps dropping fresh material into the pattern on a steady rhythm, so growth never has to rely on the very first seed alone. Auto-restart works differently: it watches the pattern for genuine stagnation and, if it truly goes still, restarts it automatically rather than leaving you staring at a frozen grid.

🔍 Resolution control From chunky and fast to sharp and slow-evolving, the grid size is yours to choose.

🌗 Light & Dark Matches your system, or choose manually.

No goals, no timers, no wrong answers. Just the grid, finding its own shape.

🧮 The maths, for anyone curious

Morphe implements the Gray-Scott model: two scalar fields, U (activator) and V (inhibitor), updated each step according to

∂U/∂t = Du·∇²U − U·V² + f·(1−U) ∂V/∂t = Dv·∇²V + U·V² − (f+k)·V

where ∇² is the discrete Laplacian, Du and Dv are diffusion rates, f is the feed rate, and k is the kill rate. The entire visual vocabulary of the app, spots, mitosis, worms, coral, chaos, and waves, comes purely from where (f, k) sits in this two dimensional parameter space. Colour is applied only at render time as a function of the V field; it never feeds back into the simulation itself.