Ramaweb | spider webs that evolve

Nine spider webs hang in the night, one parent in the centre and eight children around it. Each child carries the parent's genes with a small change or two. We choose the web to keep, it moves to the centre, and the next generation is spun from it. Generation by generation, the webs drift towards whatever we keep choosing.

Or we can step back and let the flies decide. Three hundred flies land at random on every web. A web that catches more flies scores higher, but every thread of silk has a cost, so the winning webs learn to catch the most with the least. Nobody designs them. They simply appear.

Photosensitivity warning: Ramaweb draws fine, high-contrast line patterns that keep changing, with moving shapes and small points of light. For a small number of people, patterns like these can trigger seizures. Please do not play if you have photosensitive epilepsy, and stop at once if you feel dizzy or unwell. The Slow pace and the Moonlight look are the calmest settings.

Contemplate full screen Open in its own window

Ways to play

• Be the selector. Click or tap the web to keep. On a phone, a first tap marks the web and a second tap confirms it. With a keyboard, the keys 1 to 9 follow the layout of a numeric keypad, with 1 at the bottom left and 9 at the top right. Try keeping only the densest webs, or only the strangest, and see where twenty generations lead.
• Let the flies choose. In the settings, switch to "The flies choose" and watch. Amber points are flies caught, faint points are flies that got away. Each web shows its score: 20 points for every fly caught, minus a tenth of a point for every unit of silk spun.
• Contemplate. The eye button opens a full screen, slow, hands-free version where the flies do the choosing. The controls fade away, and now and then a short line for reflection drifts in. It makes a calm companion for a few minutes of stillness.
• Keep a picture. The camera button saves the current generation as a PNG image. When sharing pictures, please add #ramaweb, so we can all find each other's webs.
• Go back to 1992. The BBC Micro look draws the webs in cyan on black, exactly as the original program did.

A small meditation in silk

The spider is an old teacher. In the Mundaka Upanishad, the whole universe arises from the Imperishable the way a spider sends out its thread and draws it back in again. In the Buddhist image of Indra's net, the cosmos is a web with a jewel at every knot, and every jewel reflects all the others. Each strand touches everything.

Watching Ramaweb is a way to sit with a few simple truths. No web is ever spun twice: even a parent, rewoven from the same genes, comes out a little different each time. Nothing in the web is planned, yet form appears from small changes, kept or let go. And every thread has a price, so the webs that last are the ones that waste the least.

A simple practice: choose the Slow pace, let the flies decide, and follow the spiral as it winds outward from the hub, one thread at a time. When the mind wanders, come back to the next thread.

How the webs evolve

Every web carries three genes, and each gene is a range rather than a single number: the gap between turns of the spiral, the angle between neighbouring spokes and the length of each spoke. When a web is spun, every spoke takes a fresh random value from its range. The spokes go down first, each joined to the last by a frame thread, and then the spiral winds outward until the silk runs out or the spiral reaches the end of a spoke.

When we choose, every gene range in the eight children drifts a little each generation. When the flies choose, one gene range in each child jumps up or down by a fixed step, and the parent keeps its place unless a child does strictly better. The settings panel shows the parent's genes, and in fly mode a small chart of the winning score over time.