---
title: "Bert Wang-Chak Chan"
type: "entity"
entity_kind: "person"
status: "hub"
canonical_name: "Bert Wang-Chak Chan"
aliases: []
first_seen: "2026-08-20T00:00:00.000Z"
writer_model: "claude-sonnet-5"
connects_to: ["Lenia","Microcosmos (artificial-life engine)","cellular automata","artificial life"]
seek_code_commit: "17d9798"
---


Artificial-life researcher who created Lenia (2019), a continuous
cellular-automaton system that generates lifelike self-organizing patterns
on a mass-conservative field — a well-known substrate in the artificial-life
research community.

Matters to this vault as a co-author of Microcosmos (arXiv:2607.02954,
2026), whose introduction argues for physically grounded, differentiable
simulation as an alternative to the abstract cellular-automaton lineage his
own earlier work (Lenia) belongs to — one author, two competing substrates,
five years apart.

## References
- [[claim-microcosmos-elastic-filaments-differentiable-gpu-fluid]]
- Captures: 2026-07-09-hop-microcosmos-gpu-alife, 2026-08-20-do-microcosmoss-scaling-benchmark-linear-to-500k-particles