FRESH

Hacker News

Home

Mr. Baby Paint and accidentally discovering a new cellular automata

215 points by jfil

by fwipsy

7 subcomments

People who grow up using these sorts of bespoke software are gonna have some pretty weird nostalgia. "Hey when you were a toddler did you ever play with a paint app where the fill tool created flashing swirly patterns? ...no?"

by tzs

1 subcomments

Using the pattern on the top left of the array of patterns I clicked several times and got a setup where it was still flood filling after maybe 10 minutes.
Unlike all the other times I'd tried where it quickly ended up with black or white dominating and then filling the whole area (except once when it became all white except for a single black pixel) this ended up with the whole area filled with a checkerboard pattern except for a jagged fault line running from top to bottom. The waves of filling would cause small changes to the fault line, and occasionally a small island of black or white would form and then be taken over by the checkerboard.
I was going to let it go for a lot longer but accidentally did the "back" gesture on my mouse bringing me back here. I've tried several times since then but that is the only time I got something that was long running.
Anyone else get any interesting long running ones?

by xyzzy_plugh

1 subcomments

This might be the coolest site on the Internet. What an awesome paint program and what a great write up. I wish there was more of this sort of thing in the world.
I love the "show source" toggle!

by pmkary

0 subcomment

The app is true marking of a genius maker. A blank space app where all the interface elements and interactions and ideas are made from scratch. There's a George Lukas like "world building" in it, the blog, the website that is just so nice to watch. One of those things you hardly see in any new product/project/... these days. I loved this.

by gota

0 subcomment

It's hard to believe how spot-on this is to what I've been looking for. I thought about coding something almost exactly like this, for the exact same reasons as the author describes.
I see this is from earlier in the year; I've certainly googled for this kind of thing a few times since then, and never got this as a result.
Thanks OP for posting.

by gumboshoes

0 subcomment

Mr. Baby Paint owes at least a mention to KidPix, that Mac OS 9 program that got there first for kid-focused computer art.

by functionmouse

0 subcomment

Good Lord what is happening in there?
These screenshots look awesome. Definitely checking this one out. Thanks for this!

by edg5000

0 subcomment

Those font tests are cool, he's created a unique way of rendering fonts, an interesting, playful look. And great that he's letting his son play with the computer.

by rootsudo

0 subcomment

I spy a Model m keyboard and a 17” crt compaq monitor
OP you’re amazing. It’s nice to see kids today can grow up to exposed to the same hardware I’m assuming you (well, me too, so us) grew up with!

by kannanvijayan

0 subcomment

What a wonderful looking piece of software :) My child is far past toddler age but I shall keep this in mind as a gift for friends of mine that are about to have children.

by fennec-posix

2 subcomments

My parents had me setup on an old MacBook when I was about 1, It was an application called "babysmash" or something. It would pop up shapes and noises as you hit the keyboard. I have no memory of this, there's just a picture of me at a laptop in a high-chair.

by kryptoncalm

0 subcomment

Looks great! A similar (alphabet-centric) program with even more limited/robust operation is AlphaBaby: https://www.littlepotatosoftware.com/products/AlphaBaby-maco...

by adamraudonis

0 subcomment

Cool project! Some of the patterns you can create are insane...

by DonHopkins

1 subcomments

I love this! May your baby grow up weird and unique like cellular automata rules, thinking globally and acting locally.
It's weird like the cellular automata painting system I've been working on for a long time, which I rewrote in JavaScript a while ago, and is in serious need to rewriting, but runs pretty fast now anyway in spite of itself.
Norman Margolus and Tommaso Toffoli's "Cellular Automata Machines: A New Environment for Modeling" from MIT Press is one of my favorite books of all time! It shows lots of peculiarly indented Forth code.
https://donhopkins.com/home/cam-book.pdf
I recorded this demo for Norman Margolus, one of the creators of the CAM-6 and authors of the book about it, so it starts showing the book, gets pretty technical, and dives deep into some forth code, but then it gets into the demo and on to somẻ fun heat diffusions about here:
https://youtu.be/LyLMHxRNuck?t=531
Here's where I demonstrate some meta rules that let you paint which of 16 dithered heat diffusion kernels to run per cell, that I use for storytelling, then an even weirder demo of painting with Ridiculous Instruction Set Code parallel cellular automata machine language with many diverse rules (not all diffusion, including life, brian's brain, cow spot anneal, torben's foamy anneal, 8 directional data moving "busses", and others):
https://youtu.be/LyLMHxRNuck?t=1398
More info that I'm hoping to cover in a future Repo Show video with Norman:
CAM6 — Don's cellular-automata machine simulator (firsthand)
https://github.com/SimHacker/WillWrightShowForFood/blob/main...
What I Made With Your Magic — the CAM6 Demo, for Norman
https://github.com/SimHacker/WillWrightShowForFood/blob/main...
Also here's some stuff about granular sound synthesis with a "musical gas" cellular automata, babies should love it! Includes farting and laughing gas!
https://github.com/SimHacker/WillWrightShowForFood/blob/main...

by drbscl

1 subcomments

This is a very enjoyable read, what a great project!

by eleventen

1 subcomments

I will be using this to design local event posters.
Edit: I bought a copy and I'm having a blast!

by arikrahman

0 subcomment

Very creative and charming use case.

by PowerElectronix

0 subcomment

Cool project and cool crt monitor

by pjs_

0 subcomment

BEAUTIFUL WORK!!!!!

0 subcomment

by JKCalhoun

0 subcomment

I'll be that guy… Oh man, give that kid some blocks to play with instead!
;-)

by hankbond

0 subcomment

Now this is personal computing done right!

by bobbytheblkbear

0 subcomment

[flagged]