Some context. Marius Buliga isn't a native English speaker (he's Romanian), so parts of these pages may sound a little confusing. His academic papers are (I find) more clearly written.<p>The 'lambda' being referenced is the 'graphical lambda calculus' which is Marius's own invention of a family of graphs and graph rewrite rules that can act as a notation for the untyped lambda calculus. Chemlambda is a chemically themed specialisation of his graphical lambda calculus used as an artificial chemistry.<p>Artificial chemistries, in turn, are used to understand properties of chemical systems in the abstract, without the fiendish difficulties and complexities of actual chemical soups. Much as artificial evolution can be used to understand the dynamics of evolution without the long-time scales and messiness of actual organisms. Stuart Kauffman used the same technique in the 70s, shuffling punch card programs to show the presence of attractors in networks of chemical interactions. This sheds light on behavior such as 'autocatalytic sets': sets of chemicals that can catalyse their own production, which is a necessary condition of life.<p>For artificial chemistries, it isn't always essential to say what each element 'corresponds to' in real world chemistry. Hence some of the ambiguity between whether the nodes in the graph represent atoms, molecules, or in some cases bonds.<p>Marius's artificial chemistry is turing complete in an interesting way: it stores information in topology as well as linear sequences of discrete elements (though it isn't the only 'graph computation' approach). This makes it a good analog for biochemistry, which is also structural as well as linear. He is using this system to look at models of decentralised chemical computation.<p>As for many scientists who create a formalism, he is also evangelising it as a useful tool for others to work with in looking at chemical computation in the abstract. Take up is small so far, with only one other cited researcher to date.<p>The animations are very stylised, they illustrate simple underlying processes with a lots of visual action. The actual 'moves' are very discrete: they happen at regular intervals and rewrite parts of the graph in one go. When nodes in the graph are removed by a move, they float around in the animation for a while then disappear. Similarly when new nodes are about to be rewritten into the graph they appear and float around in the animation a little before they'll be incorporated. When a move takes place the graph is simply connected to new nodes, wherever they are on the canvas, and D3 is used to then relax the graph. Hence the violent pulsing of the simulation as moves take place.<p>Hope that helps. It's not my area of research interest (though I worked with Prof S. Kauffman in the late 90s), so feel free to correct my understanding if I'm off.