Growing Neural Cellular Automata • Hacker News Board

Re: Growing Neural Cellular Automata

#11

Post by danwills » Wed, May 20, 2026, 3:36 AM UTC

smusamashah wrote: post #4

This has been shared a few times here. It looks cool but I don't understand the usefulness of this tech. This is likely a demo to show some capability, what that is though I don't understand.

I think there's utility in structures/patterns that can self-heal when damaged, but my imagination initially goes to usage in games and unusual UI.

I've played with reaction-diffusion quite a bit, which is an adjacent idea, and there can be some fun in trying to delete all the solitons - which can be an interesting challenge when they behave like like rapidly-replicating gliders!: https://www.mrob.com/pub/comp/xmorphia/F180/F180-k530.html.

My kids enjoyed that as a semi-game like challenge in an RD I made in Android app 'Shader-Editor' on phone, and I reckon something similar but using Neural-CA could be really fun!

Particularly if animated/dynamic (moving) patterns could be developed - like 'The Powder Toy' (et al) but less discrete and more continuous - and far less aliasing!

How about a Terraria-like crafting game, crossed with Powder Toy and using NeuralCA, Reaction-Diffusion and other continuous automata like fluid Sims too! Sounds like it could be fun!?

Re: Growing Neural Cellular Automata

#12

Post by austinvhuang » Wed, May 20, 2026, 4:05 AM UTC

smusamashah wrote: post #4

This has been shared a few times here. It looks cool but I don't understand the usefulness of this tech. This is likely a demo to show some capability, what that is though I don't understand.

Information processing in organisms likely resembles NCA more than feedforward/backprop of neural networks.

Re: Growing Neural Cellular Automata

#13

Post by CamperBob2 » Wed, May 20, 2026, 4:20 AM UTC

vivzkestrel wrote: post #10

- is that a blog that you are familiar with that teaches you neural networks in the most animated visual manner that absolutely blows your mind off? - because it finally clicks and you realize how it works on the inside? - https://visualrambling.space/neural-network/ - i found one but it doesn't have text content explaining the math, the reason behind gradient descent, the need for a partial derivative etc. - I would…

No resource for this is better than Karpathy's "Zero to Hero" series on YouTube.

Re: Growing Neural Cellular Automata

#14

Post by nmcela » Wed, May 20, 2026, 8:24 AM UTC

Very cool! So much potential for interesting stuff in this algorithm. I also recently made a minimalistic browser playable cellular automata [1] implementation for a game jam - I think it's relevant enough to link here, might be interesting to some.

[1] https://nmcela.itch.io/conways-voxels

Re: Growing Neural Cellular Automata

#15

Post by CraftingLinks » Wed, May 20, 2026, 7:53 PM UTC

smusamashah wrote: post #4

This has been shared a few times here. It looks cool but I don't understand the usefulness of this tech. This is likely a demo to show some capability, what that is though I don't understand.

Building resilient, robust, self-healing, best-effort systems. Important in computer architectures, new chip designs, medicine, material sciences... I can see this being useful in different domains.