Index of everything

The cosmos

What is true in every Petri Dish game, not just one of them.

1. Emergence The rule every Petri Dish game is built on: an outcome is produced by running a population and selecting on it, never written down in advance.

The archive

What the studio keeps of everything it has bred, how it decides which ones are worth keeping, and how the site draws what it kept.

1. The outcome record One scored visit kept whole: the interaction that was measured, the fitness it produced, the genome behind it, and the frame it was measured in.
2. Behaviour space The small coordinate space a bred artifact is placed in by what happened when somebody used it, rather than by what its genome contains.
3. The elite archive The rule the structure pool culls by: keep the best occupants of each region of behaviour space rather than the best individuals overall.
4. Measured position Where a node stands in the field: three numbers computed by an encoder reading the corpus text, never read off a declared hierarchy.
5. The medium The light between subjects in the field: the interference of a wave emitted by every subject, read out of a volume the browser computes once per tab.

The substrate

The ground cells grow on, and the conditions in a dish that keep them alive or kill them.

1. The Dish The petri dish a culture grows in: one walled circle of ground, sized in millimetres when the culture starts, and the limit of everywhere its cells can reach.
2. Substrate Everything filling the dish: growth media, the food most cells absorb through the membrane, and dense substrate, the wall that stops them, neither of which restocks itself.
3. Temperature The warmth of the ground a cell stands on. A cold floor and a heat ceiling kill outright; between them a cell outside its tolerance band leaks cytosol, and a colony heats the ground it stands on.
4. pH How acidic or alkaline the ground under a cell is, on the 0-14 scale; a cell is comfortable inside the band its tolerance gene names and drains cytosol outside it, but pH never kills outright.

The cell

What cells are and how they function.

1. Cytosol The cell's single energy pool, and what it has instead of a health bar.
2. Mitosis Division of one cell into two daughters, which destroys the parent and is gated on a full nucleus.
3. Mutation The re-roll a genome takes each time it is copied.
4. Lysocyst A membrane organelle that dies launching a single enzyme carrier, which bursts into a ring of digestive enzymes where it lands.
5. Contaminants A cell that plays for a side other than the player's.

The lab

What the player puts into a dish, and how the lab makes money.

1. Compounds A substance the lab holds by mass and sprays into a dish to change conditions there, identified by one of sixteen roster rows and one of five pH bands.
2. Contracts A job a client posts for biomarks: at most four on the board at a time, each row's payment fixed the moment it appears, and a Grant paid up front as a loan repayable with interest.
3. Bioexchange The lab's market in specimens, where banked cells are listed for biomarks, bids are placed on strains the lab has met, and rival labs take the other side.

The Bionet

The map of dishes a lab plays across, and what holding ground inside one pays.

1. The Bionet The map of dishes a lab plays across: every node is one dish, and winning the run inside it claims the node and opens the ground behind it.
2. Zones The territories a dish is divided into, each held by whichever side dominates it with biomass; losing the home zone loses the dish.
3. Trophin The dish's own supply of feed, spent to feed cells and earned back by holding ground.

The lab

What the Rorschach Lab is, what it breeds, and why the Petri Dish runs it.

1. The Rorschach Lab An evolutionary lab that breeds generated visuals on one desktop, where source is one genome, the aesthetic directive is a second, and human picks are the fitness function.

The organism

What a bred artifact is made of, what it must satisfy to live, and how it is named.

1. Organisms One generated artifact's source together with the record the lab keeps about it: its track, its ancestry, its standing and its state.
2. The contract The fixed technical specification a generated organism must satisfy to be stored and to keep being shown.
3. Prompt genes The population of aesthetic directives the lab breeds alongside the code, rated by how often their offspring win.
4. Taxonomy The Linnaean ranks the lab computes for each organism from its track, its lineage, the operator that bred it, its prompt gene and its title.

Evolution

How the population breeds, what selects it, and what kills it.

1. Breeding Construction of one new organism from living parents by one of six operators, three of them pure code and three of them a call to a model.
2. Selection The Elo ranking that sorts the population, run as two parallel ladders whose blend decides which organisms breed and which die.
3. Death Removal of an organism from the living pool, driven by crowding against carrying capacity and by senescence below the track median.
4. Diversity The distance measure over organism source code, and the birth gates, clone-family cap and crisis pressure built on it.
5. Freezing and reseeding The owner's flag that exempts an organism from culling and from carrying capacity, and the restart that founds a new pool from the frozen shelf.

The visitor

What a person on this site does to the population, and what it does back.

1. Judging The public surface at /rorschach, where a visitor sees two unlabelled renders and casts one verdict on the pair.
2. Crossing The public breeding path, in which a visitor names two organisms already shown and the lab breeds a child from them with its free operators.
3. The gallery The Rorschach Lab's published population, served best-first with each organism's source, prompt gene and taxonomy under Apache-2.0.
4. The voice The generated sound an organism makes, played live from its own shader source and fed back into the image through uniforms.