a genome is a loop
that survives
BFS is a living soup of self-replicating programs. Tiny genomes execute forever on one shared tape — eating, copying themselves, stealing territory, and inventing strategies nobody wrote. You watch evolution happen. Then you reach in.
the background of this page is a real simulation, running right now
watch
Every creature is a handful of instructions running in a loop. Lineages bloom across the tape, crowd each other out, evolve predators, starve, and win — thousands of instructions per second, visible as living light.
catch
See a genome you love? Snapshot it into your collection, where it gets a name of its own — Glitchling, Voroid, Snakmite. Your collection is yours, on your device. No accounts, no cloud, no tracking.
release
Set a creature you caught a thousand generations ago loose in today’s soup — a world that evolved on without it. Does the old blood still run? There’s one way to find out.
life from noise is a published result
In 2024, researchers showed that self-replicating programs emerge spontaneously from random noise — no fitness function, no selection, no design (Agüera y Arcas et al., arXiv:2406.19108). We reproduced that experiment faithfully, and you can watch it happen live in your browser: a flat baseline for thousands of epochs, then a phase transition, then one family of copies flooding the world.
BFS is that experiment’s playful descendant — reproduction, energy, and predation are designed in, so evolution starts immediately and never stops being watchable.
watch life emerge from noise →get the app
BFS is coming to iPhone and Android — free, with the full simulation. Catch up to five creatures, or unlock the unlimited collection once, forever. No ads. No subscriptions. No backend. Just a soup.
Can’t wait? The browser version is free and runs the same soup.