[HN Gopher] Self-organising textures from cellular automata ___________________________________________________________________ Self-organising textures from cellular automata Author : fenomas Score : 352 points Date : 2021-02-12 12:34 UTC (10 hours ago) (HTM) web link (distill.pub) (TXT) w3m dump (distill.pub) | gchamonlive wrote: | This is very interesting | | I observed that the more symmetric the basic structures of the | pattern/texture are, the more stable the result is/the faster the | automata converges. | | I wonder what it would take to stabilize the worst case I saw | there, the veined leaf texture. | jonahrd wrote: | For some reason I find these quite disgusting to look at. I | wonder why! | SamBam wrote: | Besides the organic, slightly bacterial-colony forming nature | of them, I wonder if you also have trypophobia. I feel like | some of the images were triggering the same kind of feelings I | get from that. | JosephRedfern wrote: | The way the the images move during evolulution kinda reminds me | of worms or maggots wriggling around in soil. | choxi wrote: | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trypophobia was mentioned in | another comment | f430 wrote: | is the animation periodically shaking? I was staring at it and it | seem to quiver. | samwestdev wrote: | How does it work? | soheil wrote: | What is the significance of this, e.g. can we use this approach | to build arbitrary material or even living tissue? I can't help | but think of this video [0], it seems there may be commonalities | between what's happening in life and simple cellular automata. | | [0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7Q9VyHJ1l2Q | Sebastian_09 wrote: | Warning for people suffering from trypophobia, some of the | combinations can be quite disturbing! [0] | | Very interesting how the patterns react to disturbances like | rotation, and the animation is very smooth | | [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trypophobia | udp wrote: | I usually have a very strong (feeling unbearably itchy) | trypophobic response to anything "organic" that has clusters of | protrusions or holes e.g. lotus seed pods, but none of these | examples have any such effect. I think it's because of the | bright colours and low resolution. | hoppla wrote: | Ditto, it has to be organic for me. Usually holes with stuff | in it. | jointpdf wrote: | What about inorganic physical objects, like a shower head? | udp wrote: | No problem if it's inorganic. I expect there must be some | kind of evolutionary reason for it - the fact that it's an | itching/crawling feeling strongly suggests it has/had | something to do with bugs. | k2enemy wrote: | If you haven't heard or seen any presentations about the work | coming out of the Levin lab, it is super interesting. I don't | really know anything about biology, but the work around modifying | organisms via changing electrical circuits rather than genes is | fascinating, and to a lay-person such as myself seems like the | future of bio. | | https://ase.tufts.edu/biology/labs/levin/presentations/ | Moosdijk wrote: | If you want to see similar work by some of the same authors, see | [1]. The youtube channel "twominutepapers" has an explanation of | this work[2]. | | [1] https://distill.pub/2020/growing-ca/ [2] | https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bXzauli1TyU | hans1729 wrote: | Shoutout to twominutepapers, it's a wonderful channel. | [deleted] | enricozb wrote: | This reminds me a lot of the WaveFunctionCollapse texture | generation algorithm [0]. It "generates bitmaps that are locally | similar to the input bitmap." | | Very cool! | | [0]: https://github.com/mxgmn/WaveFunctionCollapse | JackFr wrote: | This is the first I've ever read about neural cellular automata, | though I thought I was relatively up to date on both cellular | automata and deep learning. I think I was able to pick up the | broad strokes from context, but is there a good introductory | resource for neural cellular automata? | [deleted] | alokdhari wrote: | Until next trip. | taneq wrote: | This reminds me of a shareware program I had way back in '98 or | something. It let you generate (or evolve?) seamlessly tiling | textures using a cellular automaton with a bunch of parameters. I | remember it being really cool at the time but can't for the life | of me remember what it was called. | ArtWomb wrote: | Results resemble common micrographs. But perturbed in such a way | as to appear alien. Appears we are on the cusp of "neural | synthetic biology" ;) | | Fast differentiable DNA and protein sequence optimization for | molecular design | | https://arxiv.org/abs/2005.11275 | | Regenerating Soft Robots through Neural Cellular Automata | | https://arxiv.org/abs/2102.02579 | enchiridion wrote: | Is a micrograph the same a motif from network theory? | EamonnMR wrote: | This does a good job of illustrating how patterns in nature | formed by cells can self organize. I haven't dug in to see how | similar the implementation is, but when you look at the way these | textures develop it sure looks like it. | adamhp wrote: | "It reaches out... it reaches out... it reaches out..." | | This is too cool. | unparadoxed wrote: | Very nice! The results look similar to my experiments in applying | feedback to style transfer networks | (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fGSXbYDpI9c), though the self- | healing properties of CA make this more interesting! | eyvindn wrote: | Authors here. If you have any questions we'll do our best to | answer them! Glad to see people find our work interesting thus | far. | | We also encourage anyone interested to play with the linked | Google Colabs [1][2] and read the other articles in the Distill | thread. In the Colabs you'll find a bunch more pre-trained | textures as well as a workflow to train on your own images, plus | some of the scaffolding to recreate figures. | | [1] https://colab.sandbox.google.com/github/google- | research/self... [2] | https://colab.sandbox.google.com/github/google-research/self... | blacksmith_tb wrote: | Very interesting work. The bottom of the article has links[1] | to the GH repo, but I take it that it's a private repo? | | 1: https://github.com/distillpub/post--selforg-textures | teenbear wrote: | there's links to the basic collab implementations at the top | JackFr wrote: | This is the first I've ever read about neural cellular | automata. I think I was able to pick up the broad strokes from | context, but is there a good introductory resource for neural | cellular automata? | mysterEFrank wrote: | I love all you guys' work. Keep it up. | layer8 wrote: | How large is the state space for each cell? Full 8-bit RGB (= | 24 bits)? | zzznah wrote: | Each cell has 12 8-bit channels, including rgb, so it is 96 | bits. | [deleted] | [deleted] | yorwba wrote: | The article says "our NCA model contains 16 channels. The | first three are visible RGB channels and the rest we treat | as latent channels which are visible to adjacent cells | during update steps, but excluded from loss functions." | eyvindn wrote: | Thanks for noticing. This is a typo stemming from early | experiments. We started out with 16 channels, but | switched to 12 channels of state when this worked just as | well. I've submitted a correction. | eyvindn wrote: | EDIT: Alex replied below. For more details on quantisation | see footnotes in our seminal work [1] | | [1] https://distill.pub/2020/growing-ca/ | phreeza wrote: | Is it common to describe ones own work as seminal? | munificent wrote: | In typical parlance today, "seminal" means "from which a | bunch of important things have sprung" but I think there | is an older definition which is simply "first". | eyvindn wrote: | Apologies, not my intention. I was also under the | impression seminal could be used to mean "first" in the | succession of our works and this is what I had intended | to communicate. | jderick wrote: | Where do the original textures come from? | ciaranby wrote: | Great post, thanks! I saw Growing Neural Cellular Automata | document you describe a strategy to get the model to learn | attractor dynamics. I was kind of reminded of Deep Equilibrium | Models (https://arxiv.org/abs/1909.01377). | | Is there a relationship between these models and do you think | these root finding and implicit differentiation techniques | could be used to train Cellular Automata too? | toss1 wrote: | Wow!! | | Really impressive work - in seconds, I see so much both | richness of ideas and potential! | | And, as is so often the case, the really interesting work | happens on the intersection of two fields - neural nets and | cellular automata here. I've got tons of new reading to do now! | | Any plans to extend it to generation in 3D space? | jsilence wrote: | Question? Yes: Why do I love you so much? I don't even know | you! | teenbear wrote: | Thanks for the write up! Just a note: at least in the pytorch | collab there are missing includes (numpy and the imread | function) | zitterbewegung wrote: | The textures remind me of the beginning of once in a lifetime | by talking heads. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5IsSpAOD6K8 | danans wrote: | > In the same way that cells form eye patterns on the wings of | butterflies to excite neurons in the brains of predators, our | NCA's population of cells has learned to collaborate to produce a | pattern that excites certain neurons in an external neural | network. | | I know there has been other work on adversarial networks, but | this analogy (along with the photo of the butterfly) really | communicates the idea well. And although I'm generally skeptical | of claims that ANN "x" is the true model of how the human brain | works, it makes a lot of sense to me that this is how adversarial | self-organizing biological structures interact. | | Also, it's a powerful example because of just how effective the | butterfly wing's "eye" is. Despite understanding that it's a | decoy, I still can't look at it and not be unnerved a bit by it. | willis936 wrote: | Nice approximation of nature. You can see both growth and | statistical mechanics in the same demonstration. | hardmath123 wrote: | See also: using differentiable approximations of cellular | automata in PyTorch to reverse Conway's Game of Life; in some | cases, you can get striking Turing patterns similar to what's | described in this paper! http://hardmath123.github.io/conways- | gradient.html | March_f6 wrote: | This is amazing. As a complete ML/AI neophyte can someone | suggests some books/resources to help me understand the basics of | what is going on here? | colordrops wrote: | This is awesome. Not sure why, but I was kinda disappointed to | find our that it uses ML. ___________________________________________________________________ (page generated 2021-02-12 23:00 UTC)