Show HN: Neural Particle Automata

(selforg-npa.github.io)

72 points | by esychology 10 hours ago

8 comments

  • meta-level 27 minutes ago

    How does this relate to https://cells2pixels.github.io/ ?

    • waerhert 5 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

      • sixeyes 7 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?

        • esychology 3 minutes 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.

          • patcon 6 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

          • afrodisiac 9 hours ago

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

            • treyd 6 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 9 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.

              • mattdesl 7 hours ago

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

              • Jgoauh 6 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

              • skimmed 5 hours ago

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

                • Enginerrrd 4 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 3 hours ago

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

                  • hamburgererror 5 hours ago

                    This is the future of scientific publishing, pdf is so boring.

                    • esychology 10 minutes ago

                      I really loved the distill articles. Too bad it was not continued anymore...