Lattice Boltzmann Method

A computational fluid-dynamics technique that simulates fluid flow through local collision-and-streaming updates on a discrete lattice of particle distributions, rather than directly solving the Navier-Stokes equations — widely used in engineering CFD since the 1990s for its locality and parallelizability.

Matters to this vault as the fluid solver (specifically the D2Q9 lattice variant) underlying Microcosmos's engine: because every update is local, the method scales linearly rather than quadratically with particle count, which is the mechanism behind the engine's ~500k-particle GPU benchmark.

References

• claim-microcosmos-elastic-filaments-differentiable-gpu-fluid
• claim-microcosmos-linear-scaling-avoids-quadratic-gpu-populations
• Captures: 2026-07-09-hop-microcosmos-gpu-alife, 2026-08-20-do-microcosmoss-scaling-benchmark-linear-to-500k-particles