Bit by Bit

See it in action: nebula generator

Last year, before the birth of my second kid, I had more free time in my life, so naturally I built stuff for no real reason besides “because I can”.

The project? A neural net trained with NEAT, that controls little “ants” that try to stay in bounds, changing the colors of the 2d world they habitate. Written in c++, deployed to the web via Emscripten as a WASM build. Why? I honestly don’t know. I was just motivated by some non-understood power.

There's a few ants that blend their color (red,blue,gree) in HSV color space. And then there are some "renewel" ants that wipe out all colors and refresh the pixels to black.

The result? I like to call the result an evolving nebula creator. Maybe you see it differently but it’s definitely cool. Watch the way it evolves over a few minutes.