Slackermanz

@toerror@mastodon.gamedev.place @noneuclideandreamer@mathstodon.xyz @gilesgoat@toot.wales I have been summoned? :) What would you like access to? Code? Data? Media? Analysis or chatting? Anything you want or need, I'd be happy to help you get a look. Slackermanz on discord if you like, or we can use this to chat if you prefer, if desired.

@gilesgoat@toot.wales @toerror@mastodon.gamedev.place @noneuclideandreamer@mathstodon.xyz No worries! Yes, I discovered/created the MNCA technique myself. A write-up of the basics seen here: https://slackermanz.com/understanding-multiple-neighborhood-cellular-automata/ For visuals, see: https://www.youtube.com/@Slackermanz/videos As for what they are, they're basically a bunch of convolution operations stacked on top of each other, but the reality is the techniques are varied and technical in ways that are hard to describe. I came up with them mostly because I was bored and wanted to try and do something interesting and emergent, and just started trying harder and harder to cook up more and more interesting patterns. Didn't really understand them or aim for anything specific. My own personal dopamine farm, if you will, haha. Eventually I ended up writing Vulkan GPU render engines to get more power and more time to run more complex patterns, and things really took off from there!

@gilesgoat@toot.wales @toerror@mastodon.gamedev.place @noneuclideandreamer@mathstodon.xyz I see the dopamine farm still works! 😂 They do produce absolutely wild and diverse results. Check out this little guy!

@gilesgoat@toot.wales @toerror@mastodon.gamedev.place @noneuclideandreamer@mathstodon.xyz consciousness? Not in anything I've made, by many, many orders of magnitude. Not in MNCA as far as I've ever explored. It's closer to something between randomized primordial physics and chemistry than biology or the accumulation of higher meaning. The complexity of them does make for compelling illusions though.