Carlman: a Pac-Man-style game where all characters are Lenia cellular-automata solitons
BertChakovsky · x · 2026-11-11
Carlman is a playable Pac-Man-like maze game built inside Lenia, a continuous cellular automaton. The player, ghosts, and dots are all solitons — self-organizing patterns that move via the automaton's rules, producing lots of emergent gameplay. Carlman is steered by CARL (Cvjetko et al. 2026), a reinforcement-learning agent that navigates by adding or removing small amounts of mass. Runs entirely in-browser with tunable action cost/threshold parameters, and was developed with Claude Opus assistance.
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