I was doing something similar with fluid equations on meshes more than ten years ago. Once you have Automatic Differentiation it's fairly straightforward to reformulate a time evolution process into one that solves for some free parameter.
It's a pity they don't give a video of the butterfly battle, that sounds a lot more impressive than the static 2d lizard.
What I'd love to see is a reproduction of the kind of embryo development videos you can get from lightsheet microscopy, e.g. https://youtube.com/watch?v=2Vnyph3Vmic
Thanks. Starting with the butterfly and playing with the rotation slider I did manage to produce some seriously "biblically accurate" butterflies. No emergent evolutionary biology yet, but still fun.
You may also like this how this mostly hand-designed CA rule can produce plausible mutations when disturbed: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qwJNeq-WABU ("From One Cell to a Multicellular Organism", Part 2, 25min, Simulife Hub)
It's a pity they don't give a video of the butterfly battle, that sounds a lot more impressive than the static 2d lizard.
What I'd love to see is a reproduction of the kind of embryo development videos you can get from lightsheet microscopy, e.g. https://youtube.com/watch?v=2Vnyph3Vmic