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by DonHopkins 26 days ago
I love this! May your baby grow up weird and unique like cellular automata rules, thinking globally and acting locally.

It's weird like the cellular automata painting system I've been working on for a long time, which I rewrote in JavaScript a while ago, and is in serious need to rewriting, but runs pretty fast now anyway in spite of itself.

Norman Margolus and Tommaso Toffoli's "Cellular Automata Machines: A New Environment for Modeling" from MIT Press is one of my favorite books of all time! It shows lots of peculiarly indented Forth code.

https://donhopkins.com/home/cam-book.pdf

I recorded this demo for Norman Margolus, one of the creators of the CAM-6 and authors of the book about it, so it starts showing the book, gets pretty technical, and dives deep into some forth code, but then it gets into the demo and on to somẻ fun heat diffusions about here:

https://youtu.be/LyLMHxRNuck?t=531

Here's where I demonstrate some meta rules that let you paint which of 16 dithered heat diffusion kernels to run per cell, that I use for storytelling, then an even weirder demo of painting with Ridiculous Instruction Set Code parallel cellular automata machine language with many diverse rules (not all diffusion, including life, brian's brain, cow spot anneal, torben's foamy anneal, 8 directional data moving "busses", and others):

https://youtu.be/LyLMHxRNuck?t=1398

More info that I'm hoping to cover in a future Repo Show video with Norman:

CAM6 — Don's cellular-automata machine simulator (firsthand)

https://github.com/SimHacker/WillWrightShowForFood/blob/main...

What I Made With Your Magic — the CAM6 Demo, for Norman

https://github.com/SimHacker/WillWrightShowForFood/blob/main...

Also here's some stuff about granular sound synthesis with a "musical gas" cellular automata, babies should love it! Includes farting and laughing gas!

https://github.com/SimHacker/WillWrightShowForFood/blob/main...

1 comments

I am sure you have seen MNCA (Multiple Neighborhood Cellular Automata) https://youtu.be/CYa-o-_eE0Y?t=41

and their continuous counterpart Lenia, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AP3zeHyWakw

Ok, nerd sniped.

> The Margolus neighborhood — how partitioning the grid makes a rule reversible.

This reminds me of the https://www.youtube.com/@T2TileProject https://t2tile.com/