heaton-life

heaton-life is a Python library for exploring emergence: simple rules that give rise to complex, organic-looking behavior. It brings together cellular automata (MergeLife, Life-like, Elementary, Cyclic, and Wireworld), three flavors of Lenia, escape-time fractals with deep zoom (Mandelbrot, Julia, Burning Ship, and Newton), Reynolds boids, and Gray-Scott reaction-diffusion under one consistent API. Every system steps and renders the same way, so a few lines of NumPy-backed code give you a still image, an animated GIF, or an MP4. A genetic evolver can search for new MergeLife rules, and an optional PyQt6 playground lets you explore everything interactively.

Results are reproducible by design. Each system follows a written specification and a set of conformance vectors, so the same parameters and seed always give the same run, and the library's .NET implementation is held to the same vectors. The specifications, the vectors, and the .NET port live in the heaton-life repository.

Here is every system in the library, each rendered by the library itself. The bottom-right tile is the Mandelbrot set at a zoom of 10¹⁴, far beyond what plain floating point can resolve:

Install

Install from PyPI.

pip install heaton-life

Extras: heaton-life[playground] (the PyQt6 app), [precision] (gmpy2 for fast deep-zoom reference orbits; an mpmath fallback is built in), [video] (MP4 export), [fast] (numba kernels).

Sample Code

import heaton_life as hl

# A Life-like automaton from a random soup, rendered to an animated GIF.
sim = hl.ca.LifeLike("B3/S23", size=(256, 256), init="soup", seed=42)
hl.render.animate(sim, steps=500, cmap="phosphor").save("life.gif")

# Deep zoom: float64 pixelates near 1e13; this renders via perturbation + rebasing.
frac = hl.fractal.Mandelbrot(max_iter=5000)
field = frac.render((1920, 1080), hl.Viewport(
    center_re="-0.743643887037158704752191506114774",
    center_im="0.131825904205311970493132056385139",
    zoom_log10=14.0,
))
hl.render.to_image(field, cmap="fire").save("deep.png")

# Zoom movie (also .mp4 with the video extra):
hl.fractal.zoom_animation(frac, (512, 512), hl.Viewport(
    center_re="-0.7435", center_im="0.1314", zoom_log10=4.0,
), steps=90, cmap="fire").save("zoom.gif")

# Evolve MergeLife rules with the paper's objective — reproducible from a seed:
from heaton_life.evolve import Evolver
best = Evolver(size=(64, 64), population_size=20, seed=42).run(max_evals=200)
print(best.genome, best.score)

Playground

pip install "heaton-life[playground]"
heaton-life                        # or: python -m heaton_life.playground

Space = play/pause, N = single step, R = reset, Ctrl+S = save PNG. The parameter form is generated from each family's params dataclass — new families get a UI for free.

Helpful Links

• Intro notebook — the capabilities above, runnable in Colab
• Repository — specifications, conformance vectors, and the .NET implementation
• Algorithm specifications
• Bug tracker

Development

Working on the library itself, from setting up the environment to cutting a release, is covered in the development guide: the lint, type, and test checks, how the specifications and conformance vectors shape every change, adding a family, the tools, and the release workflows.