2023 Notes, Chrysalis, Opportunities
Welcome to this ~yearly note on code, biology, and artificial life from Arsiliath.
Teaching
This winter I will lead a group cohort of my new course: Agent Simulation with WebGPU.
We will start November 15. If you are interested, sign up here.
For beginners, Generative Design with JavaScript, is available as a self-directed course.
I collected various testimonials from students on both course pages.
I am indebted to those of you who helped me develop these courses one-on-one, and also to those who corrected typos and gave feedback. Thank you!
Chrysalis
Earlier this year, Monotau and I shared Chrysalis on fxhash. It runs on WebGL. Click here to try it (Slow on mobile. Press g for gui. Refresh for pre-selected variants.).
There is a param to lower voxel the resolution.
The structures are, of course, 3D histories of 2D cellular automata rule sets.
Alper Durmaz captured a nice set of animations.
With past projects, I took a “nature photographer” approach, where I generate a lot of outputs (many bad), record videos, and then select the best videos. But for this project, because of how fxhash works, we had to make each random output as interesting as possible. We tried a lot of selection algorithms, but kept falling in love with rare rule sets that our selection algorithm excluded, so we eventually settled on a contrast-based approach. I am curious if anyone has worked on a similar problem before with CA.
It was wonderful to learn from and work with Monotau, and I have resolved to try to collaborate more.
Random
Life update: I am slowly doing an online undergrad degree in math, with the goal (eventually) of a grad degree in physics or CS.
Recommend: Bhattacharya’s biography of John von Neumann. It includes a chapter on CA, with references to early ALife conferences and Chris Langton (Langton’s Chaos paper should be familiar to those of you from my Unity workshop).
Opportunities from past course participants
Eric Parren shares an opportunity to be Artist in Residence at NYU Shanghai next academic year (August 24 to May 25): https://apply.interfolio.com/132739
Spacefiller shares that RunwayML is hiring graphics and GPU programmers: https://runwayml.com/careers/
How is everyone this winter? Please stay in touch.
Hope to see some of you in the November cohort!
Arsiliath