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Show HN: Neural Particle Automata (selforg-npa.github.io)

88 points by esychology ↗ HN
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!

9 comments

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afrodisiac
Super cool work!!! Do you think it would be possible to do something like cell division here?
mattdesl
This is super cool, great work. Is there a video or demo of the 3D point cloud "gaussian splat" like experiments?
sixeyes
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?

Jgoauh
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
skimmed
Can someone tell me why cellular automata are suddenly everywhere? I've seen ~10 articles regarding them in the last month.
hamburgererror
This is the future of scientific publishing, pdf is so boring.
waerhert
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