Spread Timer
Stochastic infection model — three to five random seed cells spread outward each step, producing organic blob shapes. Inspired by epidemic and percolation simulations.
Blocks Timer
Pre-planned tetromino packing — a backtracking solver finds a layout that fills the board with no gaps, then drops the pieces along that plan. Every reset finds a different valid tiling.
Maze Timer
A snake winds through a Hamiltonian path that visits every cell exactly once. Built from a uniformly random spanning tree on 2×2 blocks — twisty, never wall-hugging, never the same twice.
Coral Timer
Diffusion-limited aggregation from a single centre seed. Particles random-walk until they stick to the cluster — the same physical mechanism behind real coral, mineral dendrites, and lightning.
Lichen Timer
Eden growth model from a handful of random seeds. Each step picks a uniformly random cell on the cluster boundary and adds it — produces soft, lumpy blobs rather than fractal spines.
Forest Fire Timer
Percolation-style spread from a single lightning strike. A burning band moves across the screen and leaves a trail of char behind — a stochastic front-propagation simulation.
Frost Timer
Eden growth seeded from the entire perimeter (in random order). Ice creeps inward from every edge of the screen until the centre is the last to freeze over.
What Are Algorithm Timers?
These timers are different from normal visual countdowns. Instead of animating a fixed shape — a bar shrinking, a clock-hand sweeping, sand pouring through a fixed hourglass — each one is driven by a real algorithm that produces a different visual every run. The pattern at the end is the same kind of thing every time (a coral, a maze, a packed wall of blocks), but the specific shape is always new.
Most of them work the same way under the hood: the algorithm precomputes an order to fill cells (or place pieces) in, and the timer renders the first N of those cells where N grows from zero to total as time runs out. The interesting part is the order — that's where DLA, Eden growth, percolation, and Hamiltonian cycles come in.
Why Use One?
- Hypnotic, non-repeating motion — different shape every run keeps the animation interesting
- Visible progress — the screen filling up tells you intuitively how much time is left
- Calming — slow, organic growth is far less anxious than a ticking clock
- Educational — these are real simulation algorithms you can read about in computer science and physics papers
- Beautiful — they produce genuinely pretty patterns, which most timers don't
Perfect For
- Focus sessions — interesting enough to glance at, not so busy it pulls focus
- Classrooms — a memorable way to time activities
- Sensory rooms — slow, organic visuals
- Meditation — non-repeating motion gives the eye something to rest on
- Computer science and physics teaching — every timer here is a textbook algorithm
- Background ambience — left running on a side monitor
The Algorithms, Briefly
- Stochastic spread / percolation (Spread, Forest Fire) — each frontier cell rolls a probability per neighbour each step. Misses retry next step, giving uneven, organic fronts.
- Diffusion-Limited Aggregation (Coral) — particles random-walk until they touch the cluster, then stick. Produces fractal, branching shapes with dimension ≈ 1.7.
- Eden growth model (Lichen, Frost) — pick a uniformly random cell on the cluster boundary and add it. Produces rounder, lumpier shapes than DLA.
- Hamiltonian cycle via spanning tree (Maze) — build a random spanning tree on 2×2 blocks, then merge each block's 4-cycle through the tree edges into one giant cycle that visits every cell exactly once.
- Backtracking polyomino tiling (Blocks) — pick the leftmost column with the shortest stack, try every tetromino placement that flush-lands there, recurse, backtrack on dead ends.