Self-Organising Textureshttps://distill.pub/selforg/2021/textures/
Neural Cellular Automata (NCA) are capable of learning diverse behaviors and can solve complex tasks through massively parallel and inherently degenerate processes. The article focuses on applying NCA to the task of texture synthesis, reproducing the general appearance of a texture template rather than pixel-perfect copies. After training NCA models to reproduce textures, the article investigates their learned behaviors and observes surprising effects, suggesting that the cells learn distributed, local algorithms. The article employs NCA as a differentiable image parameterization to accomplish this.