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 1 days 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 1 days ago [-]
Super cool work!!! Do you think it would be possible to do something like cell division here?
treyd 1 days 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 1 days 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 1 days 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 1 days ago [-]
Agree! This reminded me of a post that tweaked my brain a few months ago :)
Also reminds me of Dr Michael Levin's work, which is living rent free in my brain lately
esychology 24 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 1 days ago [-]
This is super cool, great work. Is there a video or demo of the 3D point cloud "gaussian splat" like experiments?
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
thanks ! i feel stupid for only checking out the linked paper lol
skimmed 1 days ago [-]
Can someone tell me why cellular automata are suddenly everywhere? I've seen ~10 articles regarding them in the last month.
Enginerrrd 1 days 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 1 days ago [-]
Possibly because SIGGRAPH is coming up and these were papers submitted to that conference.
1 days ago [-]
hamburgererror 1 days ago [-]
This is the future of scientific publishing, pdf is so boring.
esychology 24 hours ago [-]
I really loved the distill articles. Too bad it was not continued anymore...
jimmypk 1 days ago [-]
[flagged]
Rendered at 18:36:25 GMT+0000 (Coordinated Universal Time) with Vercel.
Would be fun if selecting a new pattern didn't refresh the image as it is. Although maybe that's a requirement?
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
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.