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Comment by whilenot-dev | Hacker News Reader

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

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The NeuralCA both generates and maintains the pattern. Because the NCA was not exposed to damage or erasure during training, its regeneration capability is a purely emergent phenomenon. However, this ability remains somewhat brittle, particularly when the central regions of the pattern are erased.

I would love to see two seeds competing for space in the grid

With the old model (and I suspect this one too) it's trained to generate from a single 'seed' pixel in the center of the image. If you erase the center of the image, that's when it completely collapses.

Have you actually tried that? If you specifically erase the center, the image does change a lot at first, but rebuilds itself eventually (albeit to a slightly different final state). It's uncanny how "biological" is feels!

If you hold the eraser for a second at the center, I find that it destroys the image more often than not.

I have yes.. You need to erase a larger amount of the center, but it almost always results in a collapse wheras erasing around the center typically regrows.

It must be more general than that, otherwise the cells wouldn’t be able to repair their area if the damage came from the wrong direction (repair is not center-out).

The model generally learns to generate each pixel from its surroundings, even if the surroundings are partially missing.

There's hidden state in the model which presumably it uses to communicate position, ie there's the 3 colors but then a bunch of other channels that the model can use how it wants.

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