Organic neural cellular automata 

I've watched so many videos on countless different cellular automata and still every time , I'm just , overwhelmed by the complexity that emerges

That last pattern is so wild, it almost looks like a microscopic fluid simulation. I bet you could use it in optimizing circuit board layouts or something.

3 things: 1) your work is awesome, keep it up! 2) it's fascinating how these patterns are visually so similar to those produced by reaction-diffusion systems (e.g. how big cats get their stripes/spots). I have to believe there's a connection there. Convolutions, Fourier Transform, and differential equations are all tightly linked, so this isn't too surprising. 3) any insight into what's up with the dithering / checkerboard pattern? It seems crucial for stability in the worms world parameter-space. It also seems like it facilitates the different color density "species". Would love to see a cross section of what's going on.

This is great! Your content is really high quality, i sincerely hope your channel grows!

Beautiful descriptions and images. You've truly expanded my mind, thank you.

Thanks for demystifying neural cellular automata for me. It's really quite amazing and reminds me of reaction-diffusion more than conway's game of life.

the visuals and the music make this some of the most beautiful bits of generative art I’ve ever seen

These videos and this knowledge and this path of study needs to be shared!! I don't think most people would understand how important this is but I can see so much potential here! This IS how life works.. this IS life and nature itself..

this is just beautiful. and thank you, mr. emergent garden.

I tested this thing, very cool!) I changed the parameters many times and it turned out very interesting things sometimes.

There does seem to be genetic diversity for the green mitosis cells, since some of them are dark and others are light.

the last slime mold example (6:10) reminds me of ant colony simulations where they start off with an unoptimized path from hive to food and optimise it iteration by iteration. Really fascinating stuff!!

These are so cool! You should definitely simulate a natural selection process for these patterns

Love the video please make more.

Great work!

So cool thankyou for sharing!

I love this video so much

I would watch a hour compilation of these neural patterns. Would be great to have as a visual stimulus on my desktop as I was working in my office.

Incredible job

would be so interesting to actually see evolution in NCAs, it would be just next level fascinating

Fascinating. I'd be quite excited to see a life simulation based on these complex NCA behaviors. There would have to be quite a few parameters to be able to inherit/mutate I'm sure.

I absolutely love this. Check out this pattern I found: all weights set to 1, activation function -(x-1.98)*(x-4.02)

Love your vids

Bluhuhuh reminded me of ecoli when you first introduced the white and pink mitosis

This is the coolest shit I've seen in ages

If you can implement some sort of pattern with a kind of conservation of energy with a little bit of free energy income, that could lead to some incredibly realistic patterns.

I found this as fun to watch as to watch real microscopic footages of organisms , but why?

6:10 stunning!!!

YAY NEW VID

1 step closer to making a true a.i. that thinks and feels like organic beings do

The thing at the end looks like roadways yes, but actually looks even more like a circuit board

lovely

The last ones looked as the patterns of the plane of a city streets, it could be usefull for some software that generates cities for videogames.

Everything truly is MATH. Wow the patterns are like real life. That is insane.

I would be interested to see contiugious masses storing the genetic code for the algorithm, and when they expand there is that fractional chance of a mutation in that small part of the mass. What colour differentiation threshold defines a contiguous mass would likely have to be a parameter of the system, and any mutation would likely have to come with a colour change in order to seperate it from the original, but. Otherwise it would be a relatively clean and elegant way to implement a kind of natural selection, I think.

What about creating a slime mold colony and an anti-slimemold colony that explode when they come into contact, destroying a large portion of the area around the explosion, but also leaving trace amounts of energy that interacts with both colonies in various energy like ways? Sort of like the matter/antimatter collisions if the early universe.

Be cool if we could somehow have multiple different ones occupy the same simulated space to see what would happen. Maybe different colours could cause blank spaces to act differently.

Man, u really gotta post the filter and activation function. Id like to play around with it

art

please add some food/resources on the way these patterns grow, to add complexity. in general it would be 2 patterns : one for organism (based on its genetics) and food map/pattern (based on how food distributed around) I think main advantage of this overlay would be the conditions you can't program into organisms so this overlay should expand maximal complexity of this system.

I wonder if you could use an edge detection algorithm to find if a new "organism" was born and then have a different filter for each one. Each organism could have a slightly different filter than its parent and thus natural selection could ensue.

Hope you've heard about Lenia

What is the underlying logic behind ? Some kind of modified Grey scott reaction ?

The takeaway from this should be the confidence that organic shapes and complex behaviors arise easily in situations where the elements of a large system are influenced by their local environment and not more distant information. To say that these shapes are 'surprising' to see coming out of these cellular automata is to say that the a-priori expectation was that organic shapes and complex behavior relies upon some complicated design. If conventional wisdom incorporated the understanding that these shapes and behaviors are inevitable in dynamic systems, we would be better off since people would not find it necessary to look for supernatural explanations for life and such.

At about 2:10 to the left side of the collective blob. How does those small "mutations" arrise, as you said, there is no genetic information passede on, but it sure seem like the small ones produce small ones & the big ones big ones. So there must be something to their pattern that acts as a semi information. Or is it a YT compression error I read to much into?

now you need to write one which acts as a predator, eating the slime mould

What is the filter and activation for all of these

6:50 looks like a circuit board made out of liquid

DO IT!! PLEASE PURSUE SELECTION BASED ON NCAs!!!

u cud prolly sell these full screen images as nfts lol

I'd really like to try this out but was unable to get anything but the main menu and a black screen. I tried loading some of the examples but nothing displayed. Do I need to enter some data into the activation window? Pointing and clicking the left mouse button had no affect either - thanks.

first song used in video?

I feel like this is the first step towards an AI takeover

오 :)

Local vibrational networks?

What is this coded in? I'm quite experienced with neural networks in python and I'd love to have a go at something like this.

combine neural cellular automata with evolution

Suppose that these patterns could be used as patterns of growth or expansion for self-organizing programs, robots, or AI creatures in a simulation. In theory you could run the algorithm for a few steps and compare the resulting pattern with the current pattern and wether there's sufficient resources to grow into that new shape. You could also have different layers of these patterns to help decide different aspects of the growth. Would interest me greatly to see more AI used in videogames.

What if the parameters were not the 8 adjacent cells but instead the 16 cells in the ring around the 3x3 grid. And 8 adjacent cells do not matter.

So is this your project?

That almost sounds like stem cells.

fun fact: no one has watched the full video yet because its only 5 minutes old edit: someone probably has now

Your discord link is broken

2:22 natural selection IS happening here; it's just that it's not "genetic" (although it is also code, lol),

ok