Forest Fire Automaton Screensaver
This screensaver runs the real classic forest-fire cellular automaton — empty ground has a small chance to sprout a tree each tick, a rare lightning strike ignites a random tree, fire spreads instantly to every burning tree's neighbors, and burnt ground clears back to empty, ready to regrow, in an endless real cycle.
How the Forest Fire Automaton screensaver works
Every cell is empty ground, a tree, or actively burning, updated by three real simple probabilistic rules each tick.
Empty ground has a small real chance to sprout a new tree each tick — slow, steady regrowth.
A tree has a tiny real chance of a lightning strike igniting it directly, and any tree next to a burning cell catches fire on the very next tick.
A burning cell always turns to empty ground the following tick, clearing the way for real regrowth — producing the same real boom-and-bust density cycle seen in ecological forest-fire models.
A worked example
Watch a dense forest region get struck by lightning and the fire race outward through packed trees in a visible burning front within a few ticks, leaving bare ground behind that only slowly, patiently regrows over the following minute.
Settings & tips
- Tree color recolours the growing forest.
- Fire color recolours the actively burning cells.
- Regrowth and lightning rates are tuned so the forest never fully burns out or fully fills in.
Frequently asked questions
- Is this a real ecological model?
- Yes — the forest-fire cellular automaton is a well-known real model used to study self-organized criticality in real ecological and physical systems.
- Why doesn't the whole forest burn down and stay empty?
- Because regrowth is continuous — empty ground keeps sprouting new trees at a steady real rate even while other regions are burning.
- Is a key needed?
- No — it's a pure local computation.
- Is it free?
- Yes — free, no download, in your browser.