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Comment by hut0 | Hacker News Reader

Hey people, I built this particle simulator in ~500 lines of self-contained HTML/JS/WebGL2.

It's designed to encourage creativity and exploration. You can just download one of those universes and open up the HTML file in a text editor to tweak the physical laws and constants. Then open it up in your browser to see the result immediately.

I had a lot of fun exploring the beautiful emergent behaviors that arise from those simple rules, give it a try too! There's plenty of documentation and you don't need to be a programming wizard. :)

The most interesting universes I came up with are on display here: https://exophysics.net/exhibition.html

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This is pretty fun, I like it, will take a look at the code later today.

> Finally, I am legally obliged to inform you of the one law of exophysics: > YOU ARE REQUIRED TO TERMINATE A SIMULATION IMMEDIATELY UPON FINDING > EVIDENCE OF THE EMERGENCE OF SENTIENT CREATURES CAPABLE OF SUFFERING.

LOL, I had to google "law of exophysics" to see if it is real.

I mean.. arguably... if the sentient creatures have emerged then is it ethical to kill them?

Well, factor in a slow extinction event and let it run for a few billion ticks. That way they have ample warning, and they might have even offed themselves within that timeframe.

True, but that law was established to discourage any research in that domain, reducing the overall occurences of sentience-incidents and the resulting messy philosophical questions.

I like this programming languages made for particle/fields [1,2,3]

Yoshiki Ohshima also made the particle/fields simulator in Squeak/Etoys that Alan Kay demos is his talks [5] and was a scientist at Alan Kay's VPRI [4].

[1] http://tinlizzie.org/~ohshima/shadama2/

[2] https://www.youtube.com/user/yoshikiohshima/search?query=sha...

[3] http://tinlizzie.org/~ohshima/shadama2/live2017/#kedama

[4] http://www.vpri.org/writings.php

[5] https://tinlizzie.org/IA/index.php/Talks_by_Alan_Kay

Wasn't aware of this project, thanks for the links!

Nice, this is really fun to play with!

I messed around with something similar a few years ago, based on (the code in) this video https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Z_zmZ23grXE

Edit: Apparently there are a lot of these! This variant is also pretty cool (smaller particles, more like "fields"): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nu5aDIEoBk0

Sweet, thank you for the links! I'll surely learn something from what they've been doing :)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=makaJpLvbow <- this one is pretty awesome too. A very simple rule and quite the complex behavior. Though I'd recommend watching it at 175% speed, muted, and perhaps with the 1812 Overture as the background music.

I love the emphasis on user exploration. And your way of writing the documentation is very welcoming. Awesome tool.

Thank you :)!

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