Show HN: Neural Particle Automata

(selforg-npa.github.io)

80 points by esychology 19 hours ago|19 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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meta-level 9 hours ago

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

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esychology 9 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?

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waerhert 14 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

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afrodisiac 18 hours ago

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

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treyd 15 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.

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esychology 18 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.

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sixeyes 16 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?

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patcon 15 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

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esychology 9 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.

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mattdesl 16 hours ago

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

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esychology 9 hours ago

I uploaded the videos here: https://drive.google.com/drive/folders/1V8XFzq2VkZXKG7Tw8ICv...

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Jgoauh 15 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

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sva_ 13 hours ago

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

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Jgoauh 13 hours ago

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

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skimmed 14 hours ago

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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Enginerrrd 13 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.

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soraki_soladead 12 hours ago

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

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hamburgererror 14 hours ago

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

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esychology 9 hours ago

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