alt.hn

6/23/2026 at 8:31:48 AM

Show HN: Neural Particle Automata

 https://selforg-npa.github.io/

by esychology

6/23/2026 at 6:35:13 PM

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

by meta-level

6/23/2026 at 7:01:59 PM

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?

by esychology

6/23/2026 at 1:41:16 PM

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

by waerhert

6/23/2026 at 9:39:05 AM

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

by afrodisiac

6/23/2026 at 12:38:31 PM

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.

by treyd

6/23/2026 at 9:40:46 AM

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.

by esychology

6/23/2026 at 11:51:30 AM

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?

by sixeyes

6/23/2026 at 6:59:25 PM

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.

by esychology

6/23/2026 at 12:40:45 PM

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

by Jgoauh

6/23/2026 at 2:09:45 PM

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

by sva_

6/23/2026 at 2:40:43 PM

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

by Jgoauh

6/23/2026 at 1:27:09 PM

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

by skimmed

6/23/2026 at 2:10:25 PM

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.

by Enginerrrd

6/23/2026 at 3:24:09 PM

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

by soraki_soladead

6/23/2026 at 1:31:14 PM

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

by hamburgererror

6/23/2026 at 6:51:39 PM

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

by esychology

6/23/2026 at 3:37:13 PM

[flagged]

by jimmypk