[HN Gopher] Algorithms for making interesting organic simulations
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       Algorithms for making interesting organic simulations
        
       Author : todsacerdoti
       Score  : 131 points
       Date   : 2025-07-13 16:59 UTC (3 days ago)
        
 (HTM) web link (bleuje.com)
 (TXT) w3m dump (bleuje.com)
        
       | alhirzel wrote:
       | Reminds me of Electric Sheep
       | 
       | https://electricsheep.org/
        
       | smusamashah wrote:
       | The 36 Points linked in the article is very fascinating
       | https://www.sagejenson.com/36points/#22_transmission_tower
       | 
       | Press numbers and letters on this page to switch to one of the
       | variations.
        
         | ethan_smith wrote:
         | The 36 Points is part of Sage Jenson's visualization of Jeff
         | Jones' "Artificial Nature" research, which pioneered many of
         | these reaction-diffusion and agent-based models for simulating
         | emergent biological phenomena.
        
       | jasonjmcghee wrote:
       | Absolutely beautiful visualizations.
       | 
       | These are way beyond anything I've done, but you can actually do
       | these with compute shaders in real time and they look quite good.
       | 
       | I played with using Godot to do this kind of slime simulation
       | (inspired by Sebastian Lague) when they released compute shaders:
       | https://github.com/jasonjmcghee/compute-shaders?tab=readme-o....
       | 
       | Edit:
       | 
       | Here's a good webgpu demo (not by me) of this kind of simulation
       | https://shridhar2602.github.io/WebGPU-Slime-Simulation/
        
       | romulobribeiro wrote:
       | This is something that Daniel Shiffman from coding train would
       | consider for the coding challenges
        
       | johannes_ne wrote:
       | The same author has a great series of tutorials for making
       | looping animations, where the animation appears longer than the
       | length of the loop. It also introduces Perlin noise, which I've
       | found quite useful in a few unrelated projects.
       | 
       | https://bleuje.com/tutorials/
       | 
       | Here is an example of a 10-minute movie in a 6.3-second looping
       | GIF.
       | https://bsky.app/profile/johsenevoldsen.bsky.social/post/3lm...
        
       | FacelessJim wrote:
       | I did something very similar some years ago while learning metal
       | [1], I recall them being called "boids". I spent days just
       | playing with the various parameters, luckily my implementation
       | was not as pretty as the one offered in the OP, otherwise I would
       | have lost weeks instead.
       | 
       | [1] https://github.com/ghyatzo/metalplay?tab=readme-ov-file
        
         | _0ffh wrote:
         | The original boids, or "bird-oid objects", was an algorithm and
         | program to simulate emergent flocking behaviour from simple
         | rules in birds. It has spawned a kind of genre, or at least a
         | multitude of copies/derivatives, often collectively referred to
         | as "boids".
        
         | stirfish wrote:
         | I've been vibe coding boids implementations because my toddler
         | likes to look at them. Here's one where the attributes of the
         | boids (alignment, etc) are hooked up to frequency generators
         | like a sequencer:
         | https://neuroky.me/boidsine.html?boidCount=1700&hue=sine3&se...
         | 
         | I can move them to GitHub or something, but they are currently
         | hosted in my pantry. Please be gentle :)
        
       | Ono-Sendai wrote:
       | Very nice. It seems some of the algorithms are (inadvertently?)
       | solving the shallow water equations. Looks similar to the results
       | I was getting working on https://github.com/Ono-Sendai/terraingen
        
       | mif wrote:
       | Reminds me of the Gray-Scott explorer [0], implemented with WebGL
       | (in 2012!!).
       | 
       | Mathematics is beautiful!
       | 
       | [0] https://www.mrob.com/pub/comp/xmorphia/ogl/index.html
        
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       (page generated 2025-07-16 23:02 UTC)