Show HN: High-Res Neural Cellular Automata

199 points - last Wednesday at 9:28 AM


Neural CAs model self-organizing pattern formation.

Now they can generate patterns at HD resolution in real-time, enabled by turning each CA cell into a Neural Field.

Try 3 demos: grow a pattern from a seed (and damage it, it heals), synthesize PBR textures that can regenerate, or create 3D textures like clouds.

Source

Comments

Akimsa3 today at 4:32 PM
That's really impressive i've been thinking that we have using technologies cause they were a breakthrough but we actual resources we can implement technollogy that was relegated time ago, like when implementing 3d there were many other until the one who was more consistent is how we visualize 3d today. Cause this looks pretty simillar to metaballs. An idea that is not longer that hard pursued but i just saw the similarity.
whilenot-dev last Wednesday at 11:59 AM
The automata just completely destroys the image if I draw too much over the stabilized image with the brush. 5 horizontal swipes are enough to destroy the kitty, is that to be expected?

EDIT: video here: https://imgur.com/a/ItZGd5X

WhitneyLand last Wednesday at 1:29 PM
At a glance it looks like it could be just iterative texture sampling.

The difference is when creating each pixel, there’s no coordinate to look up, instead it’s using only a set of rules like Conway’s game of life.

But the rules come from a neural network trained on the image, so… it’s kind of memorizing enough information to effectively do the same thing as texture sampling, but using only local information.

I’m sure I’m missing something about how it works or what makes it interesting…

zcw100 last Wednesday at 2:36 PM
I've always loved the original work and it's nice to see they're still working on it. I've always wondered if there was a way to connect this back to infrastructure rather than images. Something you could run on a cluster and if portions of it failed it would regenerate the system.

Like a bio inspired Kubernettes.....Bionettes.

bjourne last Wednesday at 2:50 PM
I found your previous work here: https://distill.pub/2020/growing-ca/ For someone (like me) who wants to understand the basics its probably better. It's very well written.
IvanLudvig yesterday at 2:21 PM
incredible work! I love seeing progress in this field. I've recently built a WebGPU implementation of the original growing neural CAs: https://github.com/IvanLudvig/neural-ca-webgpu
jekude last Wednesday at 11:19 AM
The abstract implies that strictly local updates are a hinderance to high res, however i would have thought there would be an interesting way to get speed up gains from neighbor-only traffic on GPUs CAM-style. am i making that up?
moralestapia last Wednesday at 3:08 PM
@esychology this is phenomenal work, thank you so much for sharing it. I am working in a similar thing and might reach out about it soon.

Also, what's going on? Why would the community flag and kill this comment[1], from the creator itself. If you're jealous of what the guy built, take it elsewhere. HN will implode with that attitude.

1: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48571171

embedding-shape last Wednesday at 11:27 AM
Really interesting demo, nicely done :) Would be fun if switching the "Target Image" when using the second brush mode in the Growing Demo didn't erase/reset the existing canvas, so we could "stamp" new things on top of other images. Small thing perhaps but I got sad when it disappeared when I wanted to merge a kitten on top of the chameleon but couldn't :(
hidelooktropic last Wednesday at 12:37 PM
For the unfamiliar, could someone explain what I'm looking at? The abstract was a little too concrete (heh) for me to follow.
WithinReason last Wednesday at 11:07 AM
You can make the centipede grow longer, which makes sense given how this works. Or grow a 2nd centipede for extra points.
_menelaus last Wednesday at 9:00 PM
Fascinating. A glimpse into the mathematics of life and living tissue. A toy example like this might herald self-healing machines, in the same way that the first perceptrons heralded Fable and nude deepfakes.
EstanislaoStan yesterday at 6:48 PM
Managed to get a stable loop with the worm!
amelius last Wednesday at 11:07 AM
Why are the images always generated in the same orientation (upright)? Do the cells have awareness of what is "up"?
mirekrusin last Wednesday at 11:59 AM
So the goal is to evaporate it with minimum number of shots?
hyqzz8 last Wednesday at 5:35 PM
[dead]