Essays
Writings on cybernetics, distributed systems, and the intersection of biology and software engineering.
Building Sand Wizard
No physics engine required.
How a 400×225 grid, a deterministic RNG, and a circular brush become a falling-sand survival game — with interactive examples you can play with.
Flow without traffic lights
Crowds discover lanes on their own.
How separation, alignment, and destination bias let a busy pavement organize itself without a controller.
The map that nobody drew
A city can sort itself by accident.
How Schelling's segregation model turns mild local preference into hard urban borders, districts, and dead seams.
Vehicles
Simple mechanisms, emergent behavior.
A Braitenberg-inspired series of interactive essays about simple sensorimotor loops and synthetic psychology.
Memory without a brain
Ants don't understand how to read maps.
Explaining stigmergy: how write-only memory creates complex, adaptive behavior in ant colonies and what it means for AI.
The shape of a flock
Choreography without a choreographer.
How local rules create global patterns in starling murmurations, and why robust systems often lack a central controller.