Mr. Baby Paint and accidentally discovering a new cellular automata | Hacker News Reader

Mr. Baby Paint and accidentally discovering a new cellular automata

tekstien-marginaalien-keskus.aalto.fi

216 pointsjfil50 comments

People who grow up using these sorts of bespoke software are gonna have some pretty weird nostalgia. "Hey when you were a toddler did you ever play with a paint app where the fill tool created flashing swirly patterns? ...no?"

I spent my whole childhood trying to find someone who played Defender of the Crown and never found one :(

This is... strange? I wonder what the reason might be?

Anyways, you've found someone. Or at least someone who used to.

That makes a whole three of us. I played it on NES, and it wasn't until I was in my 20s I learned to it existed on other platforms too. My dad and I spent days on that game trying to figure out good strategies and how to beat it. Good memories.

Apparently Defender of the Crown will get a remaster next month:

https://www.gog.com/en/game/defender_of_the_crown_the_legend...

https://store.steampowered.com/app/4208140/Defender_of_the_C...

I played it! Couldn't remember the name but it is the same game as linked to that I do remember.

I have a friend who's dad is a good carpenter, put a whole second story on his house, did the flooring and made a lot of furniture. He said it was about 4th grade before he found out that there were stores where people went and bought furniture instead of just making their own.

My parents aren't especially skilled carpenters, electricians plumbers, or HVAC technicians, but they managed to be good enough at those things. At sixteen my girlfriend's family was flabbergasted to learn that I had never seen my parents hire such people.

My dad was also a pirate, and I had a similar experience when I learned that you could buy VHS tapes with pictures of the lion king on them, rather than just "Lion King" in dad's handwriting.

Was he a pirate? Or did he just record off TV?

He did not wear an eyepatch or kill people, he did sail the high seas on occasion, he recorded both TV and made vhs and cassette tape copies, I don't think he ever sold these copies.

I'll let you decide if he was a pirate.

Recording off the TV isn't pirating. Why do you think they were allowed to sell blank tapes and later hard drive recorders?

If he's selling copies then maybe. But for personal consumption that's legal.

The term pirate is already expansive enough. I don't think we need to expand it into legal activities.

No eye patch, peg leg or parrot, not a pirate.

Perhaps, perhaps.

Though I'd like to propose that it's actually about exploring prohibited alternatives in spite of a failing authority, which is why the "of the caribbean" era pirates were democracy enthusiasts.

On the subject of nostalgic paint apps, I distinctly remember one of the Kid Pix drawing tools/games that I had growing up... what a weird piece of software that was!

Yeah I remember kid pix! All the computer labs in school had it.

The best one for me is Mario Paint on SNES!

I loved making animations on there.

Anyone remember Kai's Power Goo? My school computer lab had it on all the Macs

I think we're well past the point where anyone is feeling that level of nostalgia for software.

Unless they are explicitly reminded (immediately ruining any sentiment other than indifference), they're more likely to find closure mistaking it for something else.

We just saw this play out over the last 20 years with meme pollution.

Reminds me of the Nanny Lynn tapes that everyone was wondering what the hell it was about for a while like it was some kind of analogue horror thing and then it turned out to be just some cartoon someone made for their grandkids or something

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=H-x_JtsdCvA

Using the pattern on the top left of the array of patterns I clicked several times and got a setup where it was still flood filling after maybe 10 minutes.

Unlike all the other times I'd tried where it quickly ended up with black or white dominating and then filling the whole area (except once when it became all white except for a single black pixel) this ended up with the whole area filled with a checkerboard pattern except for a jagged fault line running from top to bottom. The waves of filling would cause small changes to the fault line, and occasionally a small island of black or white would form and then be taken over by the checkerboard.

I was going to let it go for a lot longer but accidentally did the "back" gesture on my mouse bringing me back here. I've tried several times since then but that is the only time I got something that was long running.

Anyone else get any interesting long running ones?

I found one that looks like it is periodic and so will run forever. See first image here [1].

This evolved from clicking using the pattern that is 3rd from the left on the top row. In chess notation it is the one black on c1, e1, and d5.

The darker areas appear to move down and right, with new ones coming on the left as the olds ones disappear off the right and bottom.

It is at least a little bit resistant to damage. I accidentally clicked in the middle of the lighter region messing up the regular pattern there. That persisted for just a few steps and then was absorbed into the regular pattern.

This could really use a way to slow it down or single step it to see what is going on.

Oh cool. I tried clicking a few more times to introduce several anomalies. It seemed to absorb them but with a change in pattern, so that it had 3 diagonal stripes that no longer seemed to move, but the two outer ones were cycling through some fixed patterns, and the middle one had some diagonal lines that appeared to move through it. I don't think it was quite repeating. And then it just stopped.

I thought maybe it crashed, but I clicked inside again, and it filled from that click, so it is still running. It just finished all its filling. It now has 3 regions: (1) a large solid color that if I click in there changes between black and white. (2) a dark grey region that if clicked in results in small black or white triangles, which can be grown by clicking in them again. It effectively dampens that damage so it does not spread far. (3) A region full of squiggly lines. Clicking there either just messes up a couple pixels or it infects one of the squiggly lines turning it into a black bar. See second image here [1].

[1] https://imgur.com/a/UkUQ4nE

This might be the coolest site on the Internet. What an awesome paint program and what a great write up. I wish there was more of this sort of thing in the world.

I love the "show source" toggle!

the show source toggle is using https://blog.glyphdrawing.club/font-with-built-in-syntax-hig... (and the author is infact the creator of it)

I made this, thank you so much for your kind words!

The show source toggle is shamelessly stolen from another awesome blog, https://garten.salat.dev/

The app is true marking of a genius maker. A blank space app where all the interface elements and interactions and ideas are made from scratch. There's a George Lukas like "world building" in it, the blog, the website that is just so nice to watch. One of those things you hardly see in any new product/project/... these days. I loved this.

Maker here. Just found this thread... Thank you so much for your nice words! :)

You're welcome! Thank you for not letting the world become boring!

It's hard to believe how spot-on this is to what I've been looking for. I thought about coding something almost exactly like this, for the exact same reasons as the author describes.

I see this is from earlier in the year; I've certainly googled for this kind of thing a few times since then, and never got this as a result.

Thanks OP for posting.

So I got it yesterday, and the toddler loves it. He's not quite there yet with controlling even the mouse movement, but I could already see some progress in his familiarity with it from the first session. Of course banging on the keyboard at full strength is still his preferred move, but that's fine.

I'll be gifting this to a few parents I know. @jfil let me know if there's a better way than to do N gift purchases. I'm worried my credit card provider might take issue with repeated purchases (hopefully not)

Good Lord what is happening in there?

These screenshots look awesome. Definitely checking this one out. Thanks for this!

I spy a Model m keyboard and a 17” crt compaq monitor

OP you’re amazing. It’s nice to see kids today can grow up to exposed to the same hardware I’m assuming you (well, me too, so us) grew up with!

Those font tests are cool, he's created a unique way of rendering fonts, an interesting, playful look. And great that he's letting his son play with the computer.

Looks great! A similar (alphabet-centric) program with even more limited/robust operation is AlphaBaby: https://www.littlepotatosoftware.com/products/AlphaBaby-maco...

My parents had me setup on an old MacBook when I was about 1, It was an application called "babysmash" or something. It would pop up shapes and noises as you hit the keyboard. I have no memory of this, there's just a picture of me at a laptop in a high-chair.

AlphaBaby ?

Spoiler, GP is now three and a half.

A friend of mine made a program like that for his kid: https://deftware.itch.io/newbietime

What a wonderful looking piece of software :) My child is far past toddler age but I shall keep this in mind as a gift for friends of mine that are about to have children.

This is a very enjoyable read, what a great project!

I will be using this to design local event posters.

Edit: I bought a copy and I'm having a blast!

I love that!

Cool project! Some of the patterns you can create are insane...

Mr. Baby Paint owes at least a mention to KidPix, that Mac OS 9 program that got there first for kid-focused computer art.

I love this! May your baby grow up weird and unique like cellular automata rules, thinking globally and acting locally.

It's weird like the cellular automata painting system I've been working on for a long time, which I rewrote in JavaScript a while ago, and is in serious need to rewriting, but runs pretty fast now anyway in spite of itself.

Norman Margolus and Tommaso Toffoli's "Cellular Automata Machines: A New Environment for Modeling" from MIT Press is one of my favorite books of all time! It shows lots of peculiarly indented Forth code.

https://donhopkins.com/home/cam-book.pdf

I recorded this demo for Norman Margolus, one of the creators of the CAM-6 and authors of the book about it, so it starts showing the book, gets pretty technical, and dives deep into some forth code, but then it gets into the demo and on to somẻ fun heat diffusions about here:

https://youtu.be/LyLMHxRNuck?t=531

Here's where I demonstrate some meta rules that let you paint which of 16 dithered heat diffusion kernels to run per cell, that I use for storytelling, then an even weirder demo of painting with Ridiculous Instruction Set Code parallel cellular automata machine language with many diverse rules (not all diffusion, including life, brian's brain, cow spot anneal, torben's foamy anneal, 8 directional data moving "busses", and others):

https://youtu.be/LyLMHxRNuck?t=1398

More info that I'm hoping to cover in a future Repo Show video with Norman:

CAM6 — Don's cellular-automata machine simulator (firsthand)

https://github.com/SimHacker/WillWrightShowForFood/blob/main...

What I Made With Your Magic — the CAM6 Demo, for Norman

https://github.com/SimHacker/WillWrightShowForFood/blob/main...

Also here's some stuff about granular sound synthesis with a "musical gas" cellular automata, babies should love it! Includes farting and laughing gas!

https://github.com/SimHacker/WillWrightShowForFood/blob/main...

I am sure you have seen MNCA (Multiple Neighborhood Cellular Automata) https://youtu.be/CYa-o-_eE0Y?t=41

and their continuous counterpart Lenia, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AP3zeHyWakw

Ok, nerd sniped.

> The Margolus neighborhood — how partitioning the grid makes a rule reversible.

This reminds me of the https://www.youtube.com/@T2TileProject https://t2tile.com/

Very creative and charming use case.

Cool project and cool crt monitor

BEAUTIFUL WORK!!!!!

Now this is personal computing done right!

I'll be that guy… Oh man, give that kid some blocks to play with instead!

;-)

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