React Diffuse Lock vs Chroma Map Lock

React Diffuse Lock is a puzzle built from the equations that explain why leopards have spots. In 1952, Alan Turing — the mathematician who helped end the Second World War — published a paper proposing that the patterns on animal bodies emerge from two chemicals reacting and diffusing through tissue simultaneously. One chemical activates itself and the other. The other suppresses the first but spreads faster. When these two processes compete across a surface, the uniform state breaks into structure spontaneously. No blueprint. No instruction. Just chemistry finding its own equilibrium. The game gives you a live simulation of this system. Two chemicals spread across a canvas in real time, 300 steps per second, updating every cell according to the same equations that produce every stripe on every zebra and every spot on every leopard. The canvas begins as a uniform amber field. Then dark regions nucleate, grow, and compete — eventually settling into a characteristic pattern. Two sliders control the system. The feed rate determines how quickly new activator enters. The kill rate determines how quickly inhibitor is removed. These two numbers — each adjustable to the nearest thousandth — entirely determine what pattern emerges. At one setting, isolated spots appear, scattered like dalmatian markings on a pale background. Move the feed rate slightly lower and the spots elongate, connect, and become stripes. Move it slightly higher and the spots merge into a labyrinthine network of connected channels — the same texture as a giraffe's patches, or the ridges of a fingerprint, or the surface of a brain coral. Move it lower still and the spots begin to divide and wander, never settling — the mathematical edge of chaos. A target pattern is shown in the corner of the canvas: generated by running the same simulation at the correct parameter values. The player adjusts the sliders until the canvas matches it. The match meter fills only after the simulation has settled — watching the meter tick up while the pattern is still forming is not allowed. The player must understand the system well enough to find the right zone, not just scan through it. The difficulty is the sensitivity of the system. The zone that produces spots is only a few thousandths of a unit wide. Moving outside it by the smallest increment produces stripes instead, or labyrinth, or nothing at all. This sensitivity is not a game mechanic invented for challenge. It is the actual mathematical property of the system — the same property that makes every animal's markings unique, because the effective feed and kill rates in any individual's skin tissue during the weeks when those patterns form are unique to that individual. Your fingerprint ridges formed this way. The parameters were set by your personal skin chemistry during weeks ten through sixteen of your development. The game asks you to find, by hand, what your skin found automatically.

Chroma Map Lock turns any photo into a puzzle built from your own memory. Upload a picture from your gallery. The game immediately strips every colour out of it, reducing it to a greyscale edge map — a sketch made of boundaries and shapes. Sky meeting horizon. Face meeting background. Shadow falling across a wall. The structure of your photo, intact. The colour, gone. Below the sketch, eight colour swatches appear. These are not random colours. They are extracted from your photo by a clustering algorithm that analyses every pixel and finds the eight most representative colour groups. The dominant palette of your image, distilled to eight squares, displayed in shuffled order. The task: place each swatch back into the correct region of the sketch. Select a swatch and tap anywhere on the greyscale image. If the region you tapped belongs to that colour, the entire region simultaneously reveals its original pixels in full colour — that area of your photo lights up exactly as it was. If you are wrong, the tapped region flashes red for a moment, showing you its full shape and extent. That flash is information: you now know what region that colour belongs to, even if you do not yet know which swatch it matches. The game ends when all eight colours are correctly placed and your photo has been rebuilt from its skeleton. The final image matches the original exactly, because every pixel was always still there — just hidden under the greyscale until you found where each colour belonged. The difficulty is entirely personal. A landscape with clear sky, ground, and water is straightforward — the clusters divide neatly along the shapes you can see in the sketch. A portrait against a complex background is harder — the algorithm might find three similar skin tones as separate swatches, and distinguishing them requires remembering which parts of the face catch the light. A market scene or a forest is harder still — many colours of similar brightness, indistinguishable in greyscale, each needing to be placed by reasoning about what object occupies that shape. Your memory of your own photo is the advantage the game gives you. You know what colour the jacket was. You know what the sky looked like that afternoon. You know which wall was painted white and which was painted cream. The player who remembers their photo well will score better than the player who does not. The puzzle rewards attention. A daily curated image is available for players who want a common puzzle: a painting, a photograph, a natural landscape. The daily puzzle is the same for every player, and scores are shared. Your photo never leaves your device. All processing happens locally.