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Posted by esychology 17 hours ago

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

80 points | 19 comments
meta-level 7 hours ago|
How does this relate to https://cells2pixels.github.io/ ?
esychology 7 hours ago|
In normal NCA cells are pixels and they can perceive their neighboring pixels (cells can't move). In NPA cells are particles and they can perceive all particles in a support radius around them and these particles can move freely. Does this answer your question?
waerhert 12 hours ago||
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
afrodisiac 16 hours ago||
Super cool work!!! Do you think it would be possible to do something like cell division here?
treyd 13 hours ago||
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.
esychology 16 hours ago||
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.
sixeyes 14 hours ago||
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?

patcon 13 hours ago||
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

esychology 7 hours ago||
Indeed! The system has good regeneration capabilities but it certainly has limits.

The particles can only grow reliably if they start from the egg-like initial condition. If we switch the rules mid rollout, we would get a messed up morphology.

mattdesl 14 hours ago||
This is super cool, great work. Is there a video or demo of the 3D point cloud "gaussian splat" like experiments?
esychology 7 hours ago|
I uploaded the videos here: https://drive.google.com/drive/folders/1V8XFzq2VkZXKG7Tw8ICv...
Jgoauh 13 hours ago||
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
sva_ 11 hours ago|
From the original research - self-organizing textures: https://distill.pub/selforg/2021/textures/
Jgoauh 11 hours ago||
thanks ! i feel stupid for only checking out the linked paper lol
skimmed 12 hours ago||
Can someone tell me why cellular automata are suddenly everywhere? I've seen ~10 articles regarding them in the last month.
Enginerrrd 11 hours ago||
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.
soraki_soladead 10 hours ago|||
Possibly because SIGGRAPH is coming up and these were papers submitted to that conference.
hamburgererror 12 hours ago||
This is the future of scientific publishing, pdf is so boring.
esychology 7 hours ago|
I really loved the distill articles. Too bad it was not continued anymore...
jimmypk 10 hours ago|
[flagged]