Show HN: CombOS – 50-node bio-inspired swarm OS (browser demo) (combos-demo.netlify.app)

CombOS is a browser demo of a bio‑inspired distributed operating system running across a 50‑node swarm that coordinates through visible heartbeat pulses and quorum voting — essentially a digital beehive. Nodes have specialized roles (a central “Queen” issues repair leases and strategic hints, cyan Workers process tasks, red Sentinels add cautious anomaly detection, and green Drones can forcibly trigger repairs when consensus stalls). Coordination uses pulse propagation (expanding rings) for time sync and neighbor discovery, hex‑grid spatial addressing for locality, and quorum voting to decide repairs; simple local fixes apply instantly while complex repairs escalate to distributed consensus. The system explicitly avoids centralized control, relying on emergent behavior from simple node rules. This demo matters because it ties concrete primitives (pulse‑based time sync, spatial addressing, distributed consensus, self‑healing) into a cohesive architecture applicable to swarm robotics, edge AI orchestration, and spatial computing interfaces. It’s interactive — you can inject single anomalies or bursts to watch rapid neighbor detection, the voting choreography, and the visual “repair shimmer” — letting you observe failure detection, consensus latency, and override dynamics in real time. For researchers and engineers, CombOS is a compact, visual testbed for studying fault tolerance, role‑based governance, and scalable coordination patterns in distributed AI systems.