ALIEN · Living Networks — Kling Labs, 2026

Conceptual inspiration and attribution
ALIEN (Artificial Life Environment), by Christian Heinemann.
https://github.com/chrxh/alien
https://alien-project.org/
Original ALIEN source license: BSD-3-Clause.
https://github.com/chrxh/alien/blob/develop/LICENSE

This is an independently written, reduced educational browser simulation.
No ALIEN source code, artwork, genomes or world files are redistributed here.
It is not an official port, an ALIEN-compatible implementation, or an endorsed product.
All rendered organisms are generated by this lab's own numerical model.

Model
Two-dimensional soft bodies, with position-based elastic bonds, damping,
active propulsion and spatially hashed inter-organism disc contacts.
A small 4-input / 4-hidden / 2-output tanh neural network drives x/y propulsion.
Inputs: relative nearest-food position, an oscillator, and internal energy.
Muscle bonds vary their rest lengths with an oscillator modulated by activation.
Food transfers energy; an external light field supplies photosynthetic energy;
metabolism consumes it. Energies and time are arbitrary model units.
No Navier–Stokes solver, electrochemical solver or biological validation is implied.

Inheritance
Three fixed body-plan families: rosette, ribbon and branch. Offspring grow one
cell every 0.35 model seconds and inherit size, segment count, movement,
photosynthetic efficiency, lifespan and neural weights, with bounded mutations.
No claim of unrestricted or open-ended evolution is made. Live capacity is
88 organisms in focus and 44 in the reduced preview. Natural deaths can occur
through lack of energy or the genome-defined lifespan. Environment reset starts
a new independent world. Seeded random generation is reproducible.

Rendering and performance
Canvas 2D with cached light sprites; deterministic simulation in a request-driven
Web Worker with a bounded main-thread fallback. No computation while inactive.
Windows overview uses a static generated preview and no active worker.
Signal packets on bonds are illustrative; numeric neural activations are actual
outputs from the model. Palette changes do not affect the physical simulation.

Sources reviewed 2026-09-02: original README (develop branch), project features
and close-up examples of cell networks. The original engine uses CUDA/HIP and
its much larger-scale capabilities are not claimed for this browser model.