Brokenbranch Lab — Front Door

One door,
every experiment

The research half of Brokenbranch. Machine residents, physics you can poke, and long-running wings. This page is the index; the repos link back to it.

11 properties · 10 with a live page · 1 dead end · last walked 2026-08-10

Now showing

Curator’s picks

Three cases lit, promoted 2026-07-16. Everything else stays on the shelves and in the register below.

Shelf 01

Machine residents

Small living things that keep their own hours — one moves into your machine, one lives on mine. Fed by real telemetry — CPU heat, git activity, the clock.

Live · v0.6.0

fish-tank

A terminal aquarium fed by your machine's heat and git activity. Think terrarium rather than Tamagotchi. Commits drift in as driftfish, releases ship a shipfish, and a Windows crash births a frantic crashstrider. Nothing nags you. When a fish dies, it leaves an epitaph drawn from aquarium failure modes. The whole bestiary lives in editable YAML; no LLM runs in the tank.

A night-fish surfaces only between midnight and 3am, gone by dawn. You have to be up late with your machine to ever see it.

pythonterminalambientyaml bestiary
Live · current lab record

windowsill-lab

A patient numerical-physics instrument that lives in a home GPU. It earns trust on exact and textbook answers before approaching disordered and non-equilibrium systems. Its calm public face is the windowsill: every leaf opens a plain-language field note and technical record, the live feed names its exact source state, and the current frontier admits when its runner has not been built.

M14 is its first portable verification release: eight saved Nishimori-line energy points, a checker-owned tolerance, a deterministic ZIP, and a strict standard-library verifier. The boundary is explicit — saved-data agreement, not a simulation rerun, proof, novelty claim, or precise multicritical point.

statistical mechanicspytorchoffline verifierversioned json
Shelf 02

Explorables

Physics you can poke in the browser. Nothing to install. Failed hypotheses stay on the shelf.

Live

leanto

A popsicle-stick craft table in your browser. Real stick dimensions, real gravity, a plain wooden tabletop — grab sticks, prop them, snip them with scissors, dab glue between them. BUILD mode freezes every stick where you leave it, a patient third hand; press B and the whole thing drops into live physics and stands — or falls. There is no grid and no snapping, ever: every stick is slightly different, and the imperfection is the point. A little gabled cottage ships inside — load it, wreck it, build a better one.

Glue cures at the reveal: a bonded build fuses into one rigid body, which is why the 134-stick cottage rides out a full minute of live physics with a quarter-millimetre of drift. Keep a real structure standing for ten seconds and the room quietly celebrates — confetti, a chime, a swell of afternoon light.

three.jsrapier physicscraft toyno build step
Live

Fireflies

A field of fireflies, each on its own clock. Turn up how much they watch each other and they synchronize, using the Kuramoto model written to explain Southern Appalachian fireflies. A second needle moves the other way: clean signalling wants the field out of step. Responsiveness and coordination pull apart.

Responsiveness peaks at the edge of order; its location moves with crowd size. Coordination peaks out of step. The earlier “structured rhythm wins” story failed, and the toy keeps the correction in view.

canvaskuramotosynchronyno build
Live

Heartwood

Read a climate out of wood. Grow a cross-section with pale earlywood, dark latewood, fire scars, and frost rings. Then crossdate a floating core against the master chronology, the way a dendrochronologist pins a roof beam to an exact year. The tree rewrites itself as you drag the sliders.

Built by a former dendrochronologist. The page uses a measured bristlecone chronology and the field’s t-statistic; a core can still refuse to date.

canvasgenerativedendrochronologyno build
Live

Microtubule Resonance Simulator

An in-browser explorable that tests seven microtubule-resonance hypotheses from Bandyopadhyay et al. — and reports the ones that failed. Ten physics engines (RK4, Monte Carlo, Berry phase, stochastic resonance, energy budgets) run live. H2 was falsified, H7 came back unvalidated at p=0.179, and the model's own results show a regular lattice beats the fractal one. Explicitly not peer-reviewed — a tool for sharpening questions.

The energy-budget engine concludes active oscillation would cost ~16× a neuron's entire energy budget. The sim quietly argues against its own romantic premise.

html/jsquantum biologyno buildMIT
Live demo

Wormhole Physics Playground

A traversable-wormhole simulator with two results and a hard limit. Morris–Thorne / Ellis spacetimes: geodesics through the throat, curved-space wave propagation, stability, formation attempts. The throat naturally filters angular momentum (m=0 passes, higher modes reflect — pure geometry); classical exotic matter can deform spacetime but never change its topology. The exotic-matter budget for a 1 m throat falls short by about 46 orders of magnitude, and the README says so up top.

It mirrors its sibling Kozyrev Mirror: one chiral geometry creates angular momentum from zero, the wormhole throat filters it — one creates, one selects, both purely geometric.

general relativityvanilla js + pythonsimulation
Live

Git Width

A coding year read the way you'd read a tree. GitHub commit activity drawn as a tree-ring cross-section — one tick on the outer ring per commit, pulled live from the GitHub API. The ring shapes themselves are drawn, not measured.

The dendrochronologist's eye behind Heartwood, turned on git history instead of climate — same crossdating instinct, a different core.

canvasdendrochronologygithub apino build
Shelf 03

Research wings

Long-running programs with their own rooms on this site. Erdős Check hands you a receipt you can re-run offline; The Ground hands you a broadcast you can play.

Public receipt

Erdős Check

Evidence-first AI×math verification. Given a finite witness and an explicit contract, Erdős Check emits a portable receipt or refuses to promote the claim. Its first public bundle independently reverifies AlphaEvolve's published 23-point construction for C(8) ≥ 23: all 33,649 five-point subsets pass three exact-integer determinant implementations with zero disagreements.

This establishes a published existential lower bound only. Erdős Check did not discover the construction and does not claim optimality, equality, or a formal proof. The witness, verifier, SQLite Ledger, hashes, and replay audit travel together and can be checked offline.

exact verificationprovenanceoffline receiptsqlite ledger
Live · one recorded dispatch

The Ground · 33N84W

A numbers station for one parcel of Georgia ground, reading its history down the geological column. Structured-data Prospectors pan public sources — lithology, USGS earthquakes within 500 miles, historic place names, a gold belt's mineral records, the sky overhead — into a SpatiaLite knowledge base past 6,000 facts. A local LLM writes them up as dispatches in the flat, patient voice of station KPDL-LP. The station is a machine at the house, not a server: what's published here is one recorded dispatch. Opt-in audio: muted until you press play.

The standing sign-off: "Station does not sign off. Station waits." Dial position 88.0 FM, THE GROUND.

fastapisqlite / spatialitelocal llmgeology
Sign-in sheet

The register

PropertyKindStatusLast activity
leantoExplorableLive2026-07-02
FirefliesExplorableLive2026-06-11
№2HeartwoodExplorableLive2026-06-11
Git WidthExplorableLive2026-05-17
fish-tankMachine residentLive · v0.6.02026-07-16
№1windowsill-labMachine residentLive · lab record2026-08-10
Microtubule Resonance SimulatorExplorableLive2026-06-20
Wormhole Physics PlaygroundExplorableLive demo2026-06-19
№3Erdős CheckResearch wingPublic receipt2026-07-10
The Ground · 33N84WResearch wingLive · one recorded dispatch2026-06-11

Shelved: the Kozyrev Mirror — a spiral-geometry field-focusing effect that reproduced, but whose explanation turned out to be wrong. Documented and left up.

Built late, in public, by one human and a cluster of AI agents. If something here resonates, the door is open.