#cellularautomata
Stars Reach doesn’t look like you remember
I've been remiss in posting updates on Stars Reach here. I mean, the Kickstarter finished back in March (late pledges still accepted)! Today, though, I want to brag about our awesome AI and proc gen driven worlds.
Over the last few releases, we have been rolling out yet
https://www.raphkoster.com/2025/06/20/stars-reach-doesnt-look-like-you-remember/
Whenever someone sends data to the nuclear reactor honeypot, that data is used to generate a bunch of cells immediately, then while it's waiting for new connections it's just slowly generating cells based on whatever cellular automata rule it was left on.
This is gonna look so good on an Inkplate, some of the screens I've seen could be Game Boy graphics :-D
#projects #tarpit #honeypot #cellularautomata
More artificial life/CA
#cellularautomata
#artificialintelligence
#gameoflife
#ai
#artificiallife
> #ALIEN is an #artificiallife #simulation program based on a specialized #physics and rendering engine in #CUDA. It is designed to simulate digital organisms in artificial ecosystems and to serve as a platform for evolution simulations.
WHY2025 Now with added geiger counter
#cellularautomata
#radiation
Wishlist STARS REACH and its living world
Over the years, I've tried many ways of making living worlds. This video here explains how we are doing it on Stars Reach. Which you can now wishlist on Steam.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qeY4ERLhNjc
The Living Wor
https://www.raphkoster.com/2024/07/03/wishlist-stars-reach-and-its-living-world/
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!
This #CellularAutomata game has since become known as Conway's #GameOfLife and famous for the extraordinary complexity that emerges within it. This #ComputationalUniverse is home to beacons that flash, pulsars that beat time and "gliders" and "spaceships" that fly across the computational sky. #JohnConway
Mathematicians Prove the "Omniperiodicity" of Conway's Game of Life
https://www.discovermagazine.com/the-sciences/mathematicians-prove-the-omniperiodicity-of-conways-game-of-life
Did some more brainstorming about a title for this project/piece and have settled on STRATA for now — these emerging structures/fragments very much remind me of them (rock strata and/or thin section microscopy) and the many folds & cross-stratifications observed on my hikes over the past few years have been a regular inspiration to keep working on this project...
Also see:
- https://mastodon.thi.ng/@toxi/111173324137924265
- https://mastodon.thi.ng/@toxi/109931051187422957
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... :)
Passively participating in #Genuary2024 — Day 9 ASCII. In summer 2022 I released ASCII-SCAPE, a textmode remix of my earlier C-SCAPE co-evolving multi-cellular automata simulation piece. Technially, it should been called UTF-SCAPE, but hey (some variations actually are strictly ASCII only).
The piece uses 1200+ handpicked rule combinations (based on custom rules & neighborhood configurations I generated/searched/collected/curated with my own tools over the past 20+ years), 32 character sets, 40 color themes, all creating literally billions of possible combinations... The piece also allows recording & exporting chunks of the simulation as plain text files (just press X to start/end recording)
https://art.thi.ng/ascii-scape/
(Reload for new random combination!)
The following keyboard shortcuts are available:
- space : toggle simulation updates (pause/play)
- r : randomize environment
- x : start/stop recording
- f : toggle scroll speed (fast/slow)
More info about both sibling projects at the links below:
ASCII-SCAPE
https://www.fxhash.xyz/generative/16205
Cellular Noir. Preliminary candidates for limited monochrome editions of prints of https://thi.ng/c-scape, my co-evolving multi-cellular automata simulation piece from last year...
(Due to pixel filtering in thumbnail, likely only to be displayed properly if shown at full size. If in doubt right click, open image in new tab...)
#HowToThing #011 — Creating a WebGL2 multi-pass shader pipeline using https://thi.ng/webgl to simulate 2D Cellular automata on the GPU. Here we use the classic Game of Life (yawn! ), but the setup allows for easily configurable rules/outcomes...
This new example (#127) is also available as part of the https://thi.ng/umbrella monorepo now...
Demo:
https://demo.thi.ng/umbrella/webgl-game-of-life/
Source code:
https://github.com/thi-ng/umbrella/blob/develop/examples/webgl-game-of-life/src/index.ts
Related projects & reading:
https://thi.ng/cellular
https://demo.thi.ng/umbrella/cellular-automata/
https://demo.thi.ng/umbrella/wolfram/
Number-conserving cellular automata can be thought as simulating particle systems, like grains of sand or cars in a street.
I have just placed a text about one-dimensional number-conserving cellular automata into the arXiv (https://arxiv.org/abs/2308.00060). It is a kind of sequel to an earlier paper, in which I had derived a general construction scheme for all such automata. But a lot of things are still unknown, and the theory of such automata looks quite interesting. In my new paper I prove some new theorems, describe how to simulate the automata on a computer and how to find interesting rules, and I show images of a few rules I have found this way. Comments are welcome!
#GenerativeArt #AI #Mythology #Criticism
tl;dr I haven't streamed in almost 3 years, but toying with the thought to give it another go! No promises, but will keep you posted! If you're interested, please reply with your timezone...
Primarily intended as pre-processing/pre-viz tool for plotting/painting pieces from my C-SCAPE (https://art.thi.ng/c-scape) #CellularAutomata project, for the past few days I've been working on a new tool to do multi-pass/multi-layer vectorizations/segmentation of grayscale bitmap images and it's been coming along very nice. Parts of the project are already checked into the #ThingUmbrella repo as new example, but now it just occurred to me this all would also be a _great_ opportunity to do a little video walkthrough! The project combines quite a large number of underexposed packages & recent updates, incl. https://thi.ng/rdom for UI, https://thi.ng/atom & https://thi.ng/rstream for reactive state handling and arranging processing topologies to only execute minimum work, https://thi.ng/rstream-gestures for mouse/touch canvas viewport manipulation. Plus, of course, recent work on https://thi.ng/geom-trace-bitmap & https://thi.ng/grid-iterators, https://thi.ng/geom geometry generation and its use as single source for both drawing to canvas and SVG/hiccup export (latter also for #AxiDraw output), image processing with https://thi.ng/pixel and https://thi.ng/pixel-dither etc. Also, the entire JS bundle is currently only 31KB gzipped (all inclusive), also demonstrating one doesn't need large, bloated creative coding frameworks and instead can easily compose smaller parts to get things done... but I digress! 
Here're some screenshots of current version...