Hacker News

Show HN: Neural Particle Automata

71 points by esychology ago | 14 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!

waerhert |next [-]

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

sixeyes |next |previous [-]

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 |root |parent [-]

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

afrodisiac |next |previous [-]

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

treyd |root |parent |next [-]

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 |root |parent |previous [-]

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.

mattdesl |next |previous [-]

This is super cool, great work. Is there a video or demo of the 3D point cloud "gaussian splat" like experiments?

Jgoauh |next |previous [-]

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_ |root |parent [-]

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

Jgoauh |root |parent [-]

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

skimmed |next |previous [-]

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

soraki_soladead |root |parent |next [-]

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

Enginerrrd |root |parent |next |previous [-]

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.