Self-Organizing Systems

Differentiable Self-Organizing Systems

ALIFE 2021 Tutorial, July 20, 10:00-12:00 (CET)

Organizers: Alexander Mordvintsev, Ettore Randazzo, Eyvind Niklasson

Keywords: self-organization, differentiable programming, cellular automata, reaction-diffusion

In this tutorial we are going to cover the basic principles of using differentiable programming for building self-organizing systems, i.e. systems that consist of a large number of agents that reach global goals through local interactions. We are going to:

• create a new tiny Neural Cellular Automata (NCA) model from scratch (588 params!)
• train this model to generate textures and solve some other tasks
• explore Neural Reaction-Diffusion
• implement NCA with GLSL shaders and see what can we learn from them
• speculate about potential physical implementations of NCAs
• discuss future research directions in Differentiable Self-Organization

Tutorial materials

• Video recording
• Colab notebook
• Shadertoy shader
• TF.js Gradient toys at Observable

Supplementary links

• Thread: Differentiable Self-organizing Systems at distill.pub
• Self-Organizing Neural Cellular Automata in 4 minutes (video)
• Hexells interactive web demo

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