FilterHN

67 points

8 hours ago

| 7 comments

Neural CAs model self-organizing pattern formation on grids. Now the grid is gone. Each cell is an agentic particle that can move freely in space and change its state.

While each particle follows a simple shared rule, many together can grow complex morphologies or form intricate patterns. The resulting particle system as a whole can regenerate from damage and exhibits surprising emergent behavior.

Try cutting the lizard and watch it heal itself!

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waerhert

3 hours ago

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On the outside it looks very similar to what Michael Levin found on electrical communication between living cells. There too, the organism's cells were able to structure and repair their larger-scale morphology: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XheAMrS8Q1c

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sixeyes

5 hours ago

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Found it much interesting that i could mess up a pattern enough that it couldn't re-form.

Would be fun if selecting a new pattern didn't refresh the image as it is. Although maybe that's a requirement?

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patcon

4 hours ago

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Agree! This reminded me of a post that tweaked my brain a few months ago :)

https://open.substack.com/pub/defenderofthebasic/p/why-does-...

Also reminds me of Dr Michael Levin's work, which is living rent free in my brain lately

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afrodisiac

7 hours ago

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Super cool work!!! Do you think it would be possible to do something like cell division here?

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treyd

4 hours ago

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If you look at the texture demo with the zeros, it looks a bit like lipid membranes merging/splitting as they stabilize more or less around a particular size.

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esychology

7 hours ago

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Thanks! Yeah I think it should be possible though it requires making the cell division/splitting a differentiable operation. But nontheless, this is indeed a very interesting and promising direction to pursue.

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skimmed

3 hours ago

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Can someone tell me why cellular automata are suddenly everywhere? I've seen ~10 articles regarding them in the last month.

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soraki_soladead

1 hour ago

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Possibly because SIGGRAPH is coming up and these were papers submitted to that conference.

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Enginerrrd

2 hours ago

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Because the space of people interested in such things is relatively small and so a single article has knock on effects where a reader of the article or a blogger sees it and starts exploring the space and posts more about it, increasing the exposure some more.

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Jgoauh

4 hours ago

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could something similar be used for texture synthesis ? of course the particles will need to be arranged in a grid and everything, or maybe recreate the texture by interpolating between the particles to exploit low contrast areas in the data

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sva_

2 hours ago

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From the original research - self-organizing textures: https://distill.pub/selforg/2021/textures/

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Jgoauh

2 hours ago

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thanks ! i feel stupid for only checking out the linked paper lol

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hamburgererror