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... :)
It’s 30 years this month since PERMUTATION CITY was first published. But of course, all the same letters had been present in other books for centuries before, they just hadn’t been read in that order.
@gregeganSF I'm curious as well about TVC, the self-replicating space-filling Universal-Computer-constructing CA. By 1994 there had been a few similar things published (von Neumann of course, Codd) but none of them could be run at that point. (We had Langton's Loops and a couple of related systems but not until Perrier 1996 would they be UCs.)
How detailed was your thinking about how TVC would work? As a machine with a static tape (like von Neumann), or as a rewritten tape (like Turing), or just in the abstract again like the AC?
I just realized that #AI “prompt engineering” is just SEO (“#SearchEngine optimization”) in reverse.
#SEO spams unique language into specific content in hopes of raising the latter’s rank when querying a corpus indexed by an opaque non-deterministic algorithm.
#PromptEngineering spams unique language into a query against a corpus indexed by an opaque non-deterministic algorithm in hopes of returning specific content.
I also just realized a striking similarity between the total absorption of certain current programmers’ time with #AI#PromptEngineering and previous generations’ occasional obsessions with #CellularAutomata models like Conway’s Game of Life.
Both activities involve long hours playing Aristotelian Prime Mover, tweaking a system’s initial inputs while inducing larger conclusions about its emergent behavior. And both groups Will Not Shut Up about it.
Looks like a good bit of fun (cellular automata are a recurring love of mine) - we would love to give people who haven't had a chance to review software a go here, but previous reviewers welcome too. You'll be taking on the role of a prospective user and colleague advising and trying to help make a package work as well as it can, reaching some minimum standard via checklist, raising issues and making suggestions as you read and run it.
Generative "music" for #genuary31 features the Langton's Ant from my "Grow a seed" #GenerativeArt continuously modifying a drum pattern sent as #MIDI notes to the Korg Volca Beats. The wobbly functions from another previous #genuary prompt control the pitch of arpeggiated tones synthesized using the #Processing Sound library which I never used before.
In Conway's Game of Life there are certain oscillators called 'phoenixes', which have the property that no cell is ever on for more than a single generation consecutively. The only examples known were ones with period 2 (so the cells are just turning on and off repeatedly). It's now been proven that these are the only phoenixes: https://cp4space.hatsya.com/2024/01/20/every-finite-phoenix-has-period-2/
On this note, I had an idea this morning about using #CellularAutomata to simulate ant behaviour. It seems like you could track the levels of ant pheromones (specifically, the nest and trace pheromones as modelled in #SimAnt) through setting the value of a cell to be an RGB value; for instance, more blue would mean a stronger nest scent, more red, a stronger food scent, and so on. (You could represent this more compactly than 256x256x256, but the idea seems sound.) #cs
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)
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...
Shot in the dark, but does anyone have an archive of the CoDi-1 bit cellular automata github that was previously located at https://github.com/Lact0/CoDi?
It strangely comes up as 404, and not even the Wayback Machine has a snapshot
Threadfall - screen recording of a pixel sort cellular automaton with a twist. I'm seeing all sorts of emergent behavior! #CellularAutomata#GenerativeArt#mathart
Threadfall - screen recording of a pixel sort cellular automaton with a twist. I'm seeing all sorts of emergent behavior! #CellularAutomata#GenerativeArt#mathart
OC [WIP] "cellscape" (working title) - doesn't look like much but I finally have moss growing lol