@inawhilecrocodile @ylegall This reminds me of some experiments I ran in high-school using a genetic algorithm to evolve cellular automata rule sets to generate maze-like patterns!
@inawhilecrocodile @ylegall This reminds me of some experiments I ran in high-school using a genetic algorithm to evolve cellular automata rule sets to generate maze-like patterns!
Yet another GOL... Code at: https://github.com/villares/sketch-a-day/tree/main/2025/sketch_2025_04_17
More sketch-a-day: https://abav.lugaralgum.com/sketch-a-day
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#CellularAutomata #GameOfLife #Processing #Python #py5 #CreativeCoding
I hope one day (after I finish my PhD) I'll manage to read many of the wonderful books by @allendowney I always start them an then get distracted :((((
Top of my list are
Today I’ve embraced my latest hyperfixation: #CellularAutomata, specifically #ConwaysGameOfLife!
I’ve heard of it but never got into it until recently. I’m still learning all the terminologies, but it’s amazing what people can come up with.
Here’s a pattern I found just now, which I’ll name Dudley since it looks like the word “DUD”. These 21 pixels animate until the 1,279th generation, where it settles on 232 pixels. This will entertain me for months
A totally different way to generate self-similarity is with #CellularAutomata, in this case an upscaling method that starts with a 4x4 grid of random binary cells and iteratively doubles the resolution.
Each cell applies a ruleset based on the four nearest parent cells of twice the width. Here are some results:
the loops that form are very fragile. an open string will eventually break into little Ls. I need a cost function that discourages them from forming
green cells can move randomly but must have two neighbours (and the neighbours must have two neighbours) = membrane
#cellularautomata #alife #creativecoding
Great talk by @hirokisayama about the history of artificial life.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8KDwmANo3a8
#GameOfLife #itch_io #devlog #gameDev #robots #classicGame
https://lispy-gopher-show.itch.io/lisp-game-soft-cons/devlog/750340/turning-robots-into-life-with-the-loop-facility
A fun with lots of #animated #GIF #cellularAutomata
Featuring the #commonLisp #clim #programming tiny changes (and far too much #loopFacility actually).
If you happen to be in Basel from June 10-16 for Art Basel, you can snap up one of 20 unique prints of my C-SCAPE endlessly evolving muti-cellulluar automata collection at The Digital Art Mile @ Space31, Rebgasse 31.
Just find the Generative Art kiosk organized & hosted by the fxhash team. The kiosk features a huge 86" screen showcasing realtime versions of generative art projects and single edition prints by 16 artists.
A small preview selection of C-SCAPE prints (30x30cm, 400g paper, high resolution) on offer (without watermark, of course)...
Noisy 1-D Langton's Ants!
Full Version: https://youtu.be/QWZrY-agZOA
A little video preview of a section of the upcoming new thi.ng website:
https://makertube.net/w/hDfuEUudsjskRtdLhVeiVC
(edit: moved from YT to makertube)
It's so nice for me to see these 10 computational art pieces & experiments all in one place (and most of them interactive & randomizable), also in the knowledge that apart from using @vite for bundling, everything else is entirely made using https://thi.ng/umbrella packages and tooling (three of the pieces are also partially written in #Ziglang / #WASM). Unlike the video (which at 1080p is ~110MB), on the website these ten realtime evolving animations together are only a ~650KB download (i.e. ~0.55% filesize) and all of them are running fluidly even on my old iPhone 11! Thanks to using `IntersectionObserver`, only a single piece is active at any one time...
Another side effect from this exercise: All these projects are only a small selection from the past 3 years, but most of them haven't been updated in the last 1-2 years. There were breaking changes (esp. the Zig parts, which I still have to largely address), but most of the supposedly breaking changes in #ThingUmbrella packages were actually super easy to address. I'm only mentioning this, since it's great to sometimes be completely in a "normal" user's shoes and see how painful (or not!) some of these changes are/can be... I'm often losing a lot of time contemplating making wide-ranging (but IMHO better & needed) changes, but always also trying to consider the effects of those on other people... This anti-bitrot exercise absolutely helped me to vindicate this approach!
Been slacking posting more art here, so time for a teensy selection of an old generative/evolutionary system from 2014 (then used for my HOLO 2 magazine guest design). Originally written in Clojure, meanwhile ported to TypeScript & Zig, I've kept working on & experimenting with it ever since... 1000s of screenshots and 100s of versions to sift through. Loosely based on research done by Barricelli[1] since the early 1950s, conceptually and aesthetically it sits nicely between my C-SCAPE and De/Frag and has a similarly huge design space to explore (in some versions coupled with genetic programming to evolve cell replication rules)... There's a 1500 word draft blog post from back then too, which goes into more detail and history of this approach. Maybe its time to publish that one too at last... :)
@gregeganSF I'm curious as well about TVC, the self-replicating space-filling Universal-Computer-constructing CA. By 1994 there had been a few similar things published (von Neumann of course, Codd) but none of them could be run at that point. (We had Langton's Loops and a couple of related systems but not until Perrier 1996 would they be UCs.)
(A sort of timeline here: https://github.com/gollygang/ruletablerepository/wiki/TheRules)
How detailed was your thinking about how TVC would work? As a machine with a static tape (like von Neumann), or as a rewritten tape (like Turing), or just in the abstract again like the AC?