Life Emerges — Living Ink
Watch particles self-organise from chaos into a living system by toggling between entropy and free-energy minimization.
Interactive learning
Simulations
12 interactive, browser-based simulations of Active Inference and the Free Energy Principle — from particles self-organising into life to agents navigating a T-maze. Each one runs entirely in your browser. Explore them by difficulty, or dive straight in.
Beginner level
Beginner
Start here. Intuitive, visual entry points into Active Inference and the Free Energy Principle.
Apple or Frog? — Perception as Inference
See how the brain resolves ambiguous sensory data through Bayesian inference by adjusting beliefs and likelihoods.
Surprise Minimisation — The Fish Predicts
Control the environment while a fish minimizes surprise, demonstrating prediction error and belief updating in real time.
Collective Active Inference — Fish Schooling
Multiple fish self-organize into group-level agents, demonstrating Markov blankets and collective behavior.
Intermediate level
Intermediate
Step through the full inference loop and watch self-organization unfold across agents and structure.
From Beliefs to Action — The Complete Loop
An eight-step guided tutorial through the complete Active Inference cycle, from generative models to policy selection.
The Self-Evidencing Tree — Morphogenesis as Inference
A tree that grows by minimizing free energy, exploring the explore–exploit trade-off through structural adaptation.
The Colony as Inference — Active InferAnts
An ant colony where individuals minimize expected free energy through pheromone communication and niche construction.
Active Inference Network — Collective Autonomy
Scale a complete graph from one agent to 150 and watch Markov blankets and collective autonomy emerge.
Advanced level
Advanced
The canonical and hierarchical demonstrations, including precision, expected free energy, and nested blankets.
T-Maze — Expected Free Energy
The canonical Active Inference demonstration: an agent navigates by balancing information-seeking against reward.
Hierarchical Markov Blankets
Visualize nested Markov blankets from cells to organisms, showing recursive self-organization.
The Dopamine Dial — Neuromodulation as Precision
Adjust four neurotransmitter channels in a harvester ant brain to demonstrate precision-weighted behavior control.
Tree Morphology Quiz — Precision, Preferences & Hierarchy
An interactive quiz on how branching growth expresses precision, prior preferences, and hierarchical inference.
About these simulations
Learn by doing
These demonstrations make abstract Active Inference concepts tangible. They are also published on the Institute's main site at activeinference.org/pages/simulations.html. To learn the theory behind them, see Active Inference and the Learning and Research resources.