i thought already that it seems more like an outwards effect filter than inwards, since if i made a 1 in the bottom left it didn't get the cells the value from the bottom left, it exported the cells value to the bottom left cell.

Unlike cross-correlation (not transposing the matrix), convolution has many sexy properties in regards to commutativity, distributivity complex conjugation, differentiation, and fourier transforms. You can merge kernels into one bigger one because of associativity, just note most machine learning libraries implement it as cross correlation since the weight are learned.

There’s a good visual explanation of the inversion here kzfaq.info/get/bejne/gduIndpzmbLeg3U.html

Yeah lots of cool variations, I just simplified it to give context for NCAs.

Technically, so long you use coordinates(as in perpendicular XY), you will always will be on a 'square' grid, even with floats.

@@overloader7900 That's incorrect.

@@overloader7900 well not necessarily; but you would always have something that can be mapped to a square grid

Also the cells could have other values, like 0.5. I don't think, a simplified definition being used in the video is bad, but the following would be a more general defenition: A cellular automata is made up of cells arranged in a grid that have values. The values of the next timestep are calculated via a convolution of the previous timesteps values.

Same here lmao

Have you figured out all the details of how it will work?

I'm just curious; how is work on your program going?

I'm planning to play around with them more!

@@EmergentGarden I can't wait to see the upcoming video then!

Nice to see you here samter! I like your channel too.

​@@TheRainHarvester I'm glad to be here, and thank you for checking out my channel! I just have to say that there's just so much other, better stuff out there too. For instance, I recently ran across Dave Ackley's channel, and he's a professor who works on artificial life whose whole channel just has a really nice vibe. kzfaq.info

the "return z/x" part should always make a number greater than 1. is this intendet?

I started with the Worm save, entered the filter above, and hit Reset State. The resulting pattern is interesting, but nothing like what you described. Are there any other settings to modify to recreate it?

@@adsilcott In the reset options, hit clear to give the screen a blank slate. Then you can move the mouse around to make the bubbles. You should notice how some of the blobs you make merge and some refuse to merge at all. Eventually that will all expand to fill the screen. It should still do it even when you hit reset, it just creates blobs all over the place and might be hard to notice the rules I notice at play. And also remember that there isn't any visual way to tell the difference between the two blobs until two of them meet. Hopefully this clears it up for you. If not, then I'll try to explain better, or maybe upload a video or something lol.

Sounds like the two types are offset from each other, like the black and white bishops in chess. Just a guess.

And what was the source, or the origin, of that "simple" initial conditions?

@@MaximoPower2024 We don't know yet but it does not have to have been an intelligent entity.

@@Gosuminer I like thinking that there is no point in arguing since it’s technically impossible to ever define the start of the existence of anything. I am not religious but I cannot deny it likely will never be found what came before the universe, if there are other universes, etc. therefore I cannot actually disprove higher powers. I do believe that god doesn’t affect anything if he were to exist but I certainly cannot rule out the fact that we will never know if he did

SmoothLife

Now I wonder what would be the behavior if we could quantum-entangle cells based on how much they interact (I know this is not how QE works, but redefining existing physical phenomena makes it more interesting)

You could achieve time-dilation by applying a convolutional expression of relativity. Using a sigmoid over the "uncapped" velocity of each cell provides a naïve approach, but why not use some numerical approximation of Einstein's field equations, applied as a further convolution over the input? Let's consider our world as having arbitrary base units, analogous to SI base units for simplicity. We can let each cell be a 1 m^2 surface in our 2D gridworld, with energy equal to the value of the cell. You could even go wild and use another activation function, or a separate convolution over the input to compute said energy. Each cell must therefore have a mass, and a (2D) density - we can choose the fundamental constants of reality in our model to be the same as real life, or we could choose a completely new set if we really felt like it with potentially wacky results. The equations we've derived that best describe the universe we inhabit don't require the constants to be any value in theory, we just found out what they are for OUR universe. Let's treat "energy" as a measure of the kinetic energy of the particle; you could even separate out into two channels for representing energy and mass separately. We don't necessarily need to however, and we could just treat each cell as having a rest-mass of 1 unit. Taking this approach, let's extrapolate out our model into 3D. Sounds weird for a grid, but the third dimension in this case is time. The "3D space to 4D spacetime" is what's known as a Minkowski space, so let's consider the 2D to 3D version as a similar enough thing, with a Euclidian (flat) geometry under the absence of curvature. This brings us to the "bending" analogy, but with visualisations that are actually understandable to us - the lycra-sheet demo of bending 2D planes into 3D objects. Adding in a channel for rest-mass and taking a 3D convolution over both channels at once should be sufficient to represent the spatiotemporal interaction. TL;DR - use a 3D grid with one layer for kinetic energy and the other for rest-mass, then use a rank-3 tensor as a kernel rather than a rank-2 tensor (matrix) to do a 3D convolution.

@@SirPlotsalot thanks so much for the thoroughly thought out reply. I'm a software engineer but that's beyond my current level of understanding. I'd love to make an app or something that lets you play around with gravity and such, all the parameters you were talking about. I think if more people got to play around with physics like that, more people would be into it.

@@R2Bl3nd i would definitely read up on deep learning stuff, it's so useful for this sort of understanding

@@SirPlotsalot yeah will try eventually. I'd have to try to keep it interesting though, I usually make some kind of game or dynamic simulation to accompany some concept I'm learning.

sounds fun. either you are extremely good at picking up programming language or it isn't as hard as I thought. Anyways, you convince me to learn it this fall.

@@NoSTs123 That's awesome! I know how I teach myself things efficiently, I had already taught myself a some minecraft bedrock edition command block stuff and Scratch before, but always got stuch because of those programming languages' limitations (mostly the fact, that the code can not add new variables.). Python is a good place to start learning programming.

@@Illogical. Thanks

​@@NoSTs123 From the way, that you wrote your comment, it seems like there are similarities between how we think. That is a good thing.

​@@NoSTs123 It's not either, or. Both are true.

That is, could an float activation(float x, float cell) { return x*(cell^2); } Or some such be added?

I've thought about it! I may eventually add an option to expose that value, but for the moment you cant do it through the UI. If you don't want to wait for me the project is open source: github.com/MaxRobinsonTheGreat/webgl-convolution

@@EmergentGarden thank you. I do hope you will add it at some point, kernel 4 if I'm not mistaken? But yea, already opened it & started to go over the code. Not a strong js wiz, but it seems doable :)

The autoplay pattern is configured so it can't be very flashy, I figured it was safe enough. My intuition may be wrong though, I will eventually make the popup more prominent

​@@EmergentGarden I'm not an expert on epilepsy and what triggers it. Clicking/Reloading through some random patterns I agree that they are not directly flashy, but certainly jarring. Some do develop a flashing pattern after a short while though. (Now that I think about it, a big part could be my monitor and the relative size of one real pixel to one pixel in the simulation. If I zoom in there is indeed no flashing going on). After a few reloads I got the following pattern that quickly develops into flashing patches on my monitor: 0.1049 -0.5843 0.6364 -0.5714 -0.644 0.9084 0.8545 -0.4166 -0.7815 With the default identity function.

The name of the talk is the next great scientific theory is hiding inside a neural network, for anyone interested

didn't expect to find you here

Did some more fiddling around in the website, and I was able to reproduce the behaviour. By putting the inv. gaussian function in the "worms"-setting (which is the one I'm experimenting with) inside of the actual activation function instead of in a separate function, I got the website cells to disappear quickly too. However, in my own program, making the inv. gaussian function a separate thing didn't work out. I'll experiment more tomorrow

The filter is actually inverted, meaning it's flipped over it's x and y axis, so the pattern is also inverted. This is usually how convolutions are implemented. Sorry, I should have made this more clear.

@@EmergentGarden Wow okay thanks a lot! You make great content. I am really enjoying it :)