The automata just completely destroys the image if I draw too much over the stabilized image with the brush. 5 horizontal swipes are enough to destroy the kitty, is that to be expected?

EDIT: video here: https://imgur.com/a/ItZGd5X

At a glance it looks like it could be just iterative texture sampling.

The difference is when creating each pixel, there’s no coordinate to look up, instead it’s using only a set of rules like Conway’s game of life.

But the rules come from a neural network trained on the image, so… it’s kind of memorizing enough information to effectively do the same thing as texture sampling, but using only local information.

I’m sure I’m missing something about how it works or what makes it interesting…

That's really impressive i've been thinking that we have using technologies cause they were a breakthrough but we actual resources we can implement technollogy that was relegated time ago, like when implementing 3d there were many other until the one who was more consistent is how we visualize 3d today. Cause this looks pretty simillar to metaballs. An idea that is not longer that hard pursued but i just saw the similarity.

I've always loved the original work and it's nice to see they're still working on it. I've always wondered if there was a way to connect this back to infrastructure rather than images. Something you could run on a cluster and if portions of it failed it would regenerate the system.

Like a bio inspired Kubernettes.....Bionettes.

I found your previous work here: https://distill.pub/2020/growing-ca/ For someone (like me) who wants to understand the basics its probably better. It's very well written.

The abstract implies that strictly local updates are a hinderance to high res, however i would have thought there would be an interesting way to get speed up gains from neighbor-only traffic on GPUs CAM-style. am i making that up?

incredible work! I love seeing progress in this field. I've recently built a WebGPU implementation of the original growing neural CAs: https://github.com/IvanLudvig/neural-ca-webgpu

@esychology this is phenomenal work, thank you so much for sharing it. I am working in a similar thing and might reach out about it soon.

Also, what's going on? Why would the community flag and kill this comment[1], from the creator itself. If you're jealous of what the guy built, take it elsewhere. HN will implode with that attitude.

1: https://smackernews.com/item/48571171 HN

Really interesting demo, nicely done :) Would be fun if switching the "Target Image" when using the second brush mode in the Growing Demo didn't erase/reset the existing canvas, so we could "stamp" new things on top of other images. Small thing perhaps but I got sad when it disappeared when I wanted to merge a kitten on top of the chameleon but couldn't :(

For the unfamiliar, could someone explain what I'm looking at? The abstract was a little too concrete (heh) for me to follow.

You can make the centipede grow longer, which makes sense given how this works. Or grow a 2nd centipede for extra points.

Fascinating. A glimpse into the mathematics of life and living tissue. A toy example like this might herald self-healing machines, in the same way that the first perceptrons heralded Fable and nude deepfakes.

Why are the images always generated in the same orientation (upright)? Do the cells have awareness of what is "up"?

Managed to get a stable loop with the worm!

So the goal is to evaporate it with minimum number of shots?