Show HN: Neural Particle Automata(selforg-npa.github.io)
71 pointsby esychologyJun 23, 2026

7 Comments

afrodisiac•Jun 23, 2026
Super cool work!!! Do you think it would be possible to do something like cell division here?
esychology•Jun 23, 2026
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.
treyd•Jun 23, 2026
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.
mattdesl•Jun 23, 2026
This is super cool, great work. Is there a video or demo of the 3D point cloud "gaussian splat" like experiments?
sixeyes•Jun 23, 2026
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•Jun 23, 2026
Agree! This reminded me of a post that tweaked my brain a few months ago :)

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

Jgoauh•Jun 23, 2026
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
sva_•Jun 23, 2026
From the original research - self-organizing textures: https://distill.pub/selforg/2021/textures/
Jgoauh•Jun 23, 2026
thanks ! i feel stupid for only checking out the linked paper lol
skimmed•Jun 23, 2026
Can someone tell me why cellular automata are suddenly everywhere? I've seen ~10 articles regarding them in the last month.
Enginerrrd•Jun 23, 2026
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•Jun 23, 2026
Possibly because SIGGRAPH is coming up and these were papers submitted to that conference.
hamburgererror•Jun 23, 2026
This is the future of scientific publishing, pdf is so boring.
waerhert•Jun 23, 2026
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