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...
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... :)
On the seventh day of ALife Xmas, the newsletter gave to me: Seven upcoming conferences! Conferences are great! They create opportunities to stay up-to-date with upcoming research, to expand our networks, to meet old and new friends, and to travel to fun places! #ALife
New variant of my kind-of #alife task. The bots can push/pull treasure and walls. They are controlled by a neural network, trained with sep-CMA-ES to push treasure together.